Blood Brothers
by wryter501
Summary: A detective and his not-quite-human partner. A stormy night, a tiny hotel room, and an existential crisis... just might change the terms of this relationship. No slash! Modern A/U, no magic.
1. Blood Brothers 1

**A/N: And now for something completely different! Because I've had this done for a while, and I don't have a chapter to update **_**Torr Badon**_** tonight… **

**Modern A/U, no magic… This short story was partially inspired by my chapter 12 of **_**The Towers of Lionys**_** (A Heart-Won Victory). And totally stolen from an episode of **_**Moonlight**_** (CBS, 2007-08; Alex O'Laughlin and Sophia Myles; I was too lazy to look up the actual episode title)... more complete explanation at the end.**

**Blood Brothers**

It was raining.

Raining, and mid-afternoon, and it would be an early evening because of the low, heavy clouds. Already the Buick's headlights were on.

Raining, and Arthur was driving, peering through the gray downpour, leaning forward slightly, tense on the steering wheel, windshield blurred-clear-blurred-clear as the wipers splip-splopped their monotonous rhythm of endless never-successful attempts at improving visibility.

On the upside, at least it was only a country lane and a half. On the downside, two more hours of this soup before they'd reach the highway. But maybe the rain would be stopped by then.

_Raining_, he fumed, and _should be Merlin driving_.

Merlin with the inhumanly keen senses and impossibly fast reflexes, could probably read a map and eat lo mein with chopsticks and drive ten miles over the speed limit and Arthur could be the one napping with his head against the window, cool from the rain streaming sideways on the outside, because he felt perfectly safe when Merlin drove.

His partner shifted in the passenger seat like he was uncomfortable, but too tired to do much about it. Arthur's sideways glance caught a flash of blue before he faced the watery gray veil again, his chest leaning toward the steering wheel, but he knew the other was awake enough for him to speak.

"How's your feet?"

It had been a leap of almost thirty feet, from the stockroom rafter onto their fleeing suspect. If Arthur had attempted the stunt, he'd have missed the perp by three yards, and his ankles would have splintered up through his kneecaps. But Merlin, again, inhumanly strong and graceful.

Merlin's own personal views on his condition were obscure, at best. He might not appreciate the admission of Arthur's private comparison – and wild horses couldn't drag it from him, in any case – but he had thought before, and did again in that storeroom last night, how much his partner resembled a hunting panther. Dark and lean and intent, silent and graceful and fearless and deadly.

That was half the reason Arthur had suggested the partnership, after all, over a year ago. The fear. Not only the frightened paralysis of the doomed prey Merlin's predatory aura often provoked. But the fact that Arthur didn't have to fear for another partner's life and safety, on the job. Merlin was fully capable of taking care of himself.

Merlin snorted his response and cuddled into the circle of his crossed arms without completely opening his eyes.

"Stings a bit," he allowed. "I won't be hanging by my feet from the roof of my cave for a while."

Arthur snuck another glance. The first time he'd shot an insult at his partner mocking what they referred to as his _condition_ – oddly enough, had served to cement the partnership.

An astonished gape, then Merlin had tossed his head back in a genuine shout of laughter. _Good one_, he'd said, and something tight and unsure between them had eased. If Arthur could accept the particulars of Merlin's life enough to make it a joke.

But when Merlin made the joke, there was always an undertone of… bitterness maybe? that made Arthur wonder, how well he'd accepted his condition, himself. He'd had plenty of time to adjust, after all – more time than Arthur's parents had been alive. Then again, Arthur had no clue how _he'd_ adjust to those kinds of changes in his own life.

"Feel like driving?" he suggested. Casually. Not hopefully.

"Why, are you tired?"

"Nah," he brushed off Merlin's own brand of caring sarcasm. "You just look so terribly uncomfortable over there, I thought I might sacrifice my nice comfy driver's seat and trade you."

"It's your car," Merlin groused. "Your fault if it's uncomfortable."

"And you find it hard to sleep in anything but your ebony box," Arthur said, mockingly sympathetic.

Merlin's wide grin spread sudden. "Silk-lined," he said. Then he shuffled a bit and squinted at Arthur. "Are you missing your bed? Big, tough cop wants his warm fluffy comforter? Or is the lady in your bed you miss?"

Arthur slapped at him without taking his eyes from the sloppy weather, fighting the grin that pulled at his mouth. Gwen. Yes, he missed her, he had to admit. Merlin knew.

The younger man – Arthur's perception of that description persisted, in spite of the great disparity of their birth-years – whined in breathless laughter at the assault. But the hands he raised in self-defense were just a shade slow.

Adequate. But not normal for _Merlin_.

"You okay?" Arthur said. Another glance from the gray-soaked world of road and sky and naked tree and gravel ditch to the warm dry shared car-interior.

"Yeah." Merlin wound his arms around his chest and propped himself in the corner between seat and door. Stiffly. And without meeting Arthur's glance. He looked paler than usual, too, which was saying something.

"What are you missing, then?" Arthur said. "If not your bed? Your couch and tv? A hot bath? A hot girl?" He grinned; Merlin-baiting had become one of his favorite kill-times. "How 'bout that chick in IT, the one who wears black nail polish and red lipstick? She'd probably volunteer to be your love-slave for life if she found out you were –"

"_Arthur_." Scandalized exasperation.

He grinned wider, the tone of Merlin's voice a victory of sorts. He knew two reasons Merlin didn't date – his condition, and the long-lost love of a murdered fiancée – but ribbing his partner was a way of showing he understood and sympathized.

And who cared it that seemed backwards to anyone else? It worked.

"Come on, then," he taunted. "One thing you miss. Bright lights, big city." He upped his voice an octave, making like he was Merlin talking. "I miss mopping my floor. I miss the view from my bathroom window. I miss the captain's turn to make coffee. I miss my –"

"I miss my fr-" Merlin snapped, halted himself at the almost-slipped truth, then decided to continue with the unintended confidence. "My fridge," he mumbled, curling up a little tighter.

"Your fridge," Arthur said blankly. What kind of - Why would he be –

Oh.

_Oh_. He said, with another questioning glance, "You're –"

"Yeah."

Merlin's refrigerator contained one substance only.

Merlin's refrigerator could easily have been mistaken for lab or bank or hospital equipment, but was gruesomely out of place in a private apartment. Merlin's refrigerator told the whole story in one shocked glance – the good and the bad. Arthur knew, he'd remember that moment til his dying day, the moment an intriguing acquaintance, a possible partner, proved the unique and dangerous opportunity, proved his trust in Arthur, also a near-stranger at that moment in time, proved his fantastic story true.

His diet, and where he procured it. Where he _didn't_ procure it. Or rather, who from.

"I'm all right," Merlin added. The nonchalant shrug agreed with the words, the tiny breathless catch in his voice didn't.

Merlin had said the same thing, the night of their first stakeout together. A convicted sex offender suspected of kidnapping a minor; they were hoping the perv would lead them to a secondary site, since his two-story in suburbia was clean. Quarter after three in the morning, and Arthur on his third slice of pizza – indistinguishable from the cardboard of the box but at quarter after three who the hell cares – belatedly and awkwardly offering to share.

_No thanks, I'm all right_, Merlin had said.

And Arthur, bored with the fruitless object of their vigil and reluctantly fascinated with his company, said, _Is it that you can't, or_…

Merlin had taken his gaze from the two-story to grin, all teeth and eyes in the distant streetlight faintly illuminating the interior of the car. _The thought is repulsive, now,_ he said. _Like the craziest entrée on a foreign menu. Beetles. Or live seafood. Haggis and kimchee. Like if I offered you what _I _live on. It would make me sick_.

"Took us longer up here than I thought," Arthur offered, as an apology. And realized there was still a lot about his partner he didn't know, or understand. "Three days, instead of just one…" He tried to imagine how he'd feel and act after three days without food and water. Next door to dead, maybe. Rummaging through trash cans or breaking bakery windows to get what he needed… "You're all right, though?"

"You almost sound like you really care," Merlin needled him.

"Not at all," Arthur returned loftily, reassured a bit by the other's joking. "Just looking out for number one. Do you know what a headache it is to break in a new partner?"

"Well, I did my best to make all your headaches worthwhile."

"Memorable, anyway," Arthur grouched; Merlin's expression said he wasn't buying Arthur's pretense of surliness.

Another reason Merlin made such a good partner. Their personalities seemed to match. The long hours of tedium relieved by Merlin's quirky sense of humor and indefatigable patience: the moments of frighteningly swift action and danger eased by the other's reflexes and strength: the frustration shared and vented somehow resulting in investigation progress.

"Don't sweat it," Merlin murmured, showing every intention of returning to his nap. "We'll be home in a few hours… and I'll be fine."

"Yes, but…" Arthur grimaced at the driver's side wiper, which had developed a squeak and was no longer clearing a two-inch arc of wet windshield. "Is it… cutting it too close?" He'd never thought it important to press for details, _how often_ or _how much_ his partner needed to function.

Merlin mumbled something in a reassuring tone that Arthur found to be anything but. He glanced at the younger man – older man? It was harder to get used to the idea of his partner's age than his diet, sometimes – eyes sharp for details that might betray the true state of his health.

Then a fairly crappy day went straight down the toilet.

In glancing back to the rain-streaked road, he caught movement and white out of the corner of his eye – low to the ground and seemingly directionless –

Dog, his mind said. Lapdog. Some kid's pet.

He stomped on the brake and yanked the wheel hard over – and they skidded with a nerve-raking squeal - and Merlin's body exploded from his nap-cocoon, all long arms and wide eyes and –

_CRUNCH_

The belt snapped taut across Arthur's left collarbone with enough force to bruise him and he blacked out for an instant. Coming to in a confusion of – _was Merlin wearing his belt, _and_ – did we miss the dog?_

The engine was still running; his foot still on the brake. He fumbled to shift into park, left the key in position with the vague idea that it might prove harder to re-start the engine if he turned it off.

He realized he was panting, and trembling – a familiar reaction to the after-effects of a jolt of adrenaline.

"Are you okay?" Merlin said, reaching to unlatch his seatbelt and let it retract. Arthur didn't say anything, but Merlin seemed to gather the answer in one comprehensive glance, and turned his attention to the world outside their vehicle, a world now tipped at a twenty-degree down-angle. The front window looking at the soggy brown and pathetic green of a high steep bank of earth. "What happened?"

Arthur unlatched his own belt and pushed open the driver's door. "There was a dog."

Just below, a muddy-gravel gash of a ditch, the car tilted down and to the left as it rested half-in and half-out, and the bumper buried in the high bank of the curve of the road. Arthur's shoes slipped once as he picked his way toward the back of the car.

"I hope we didn't hit the little bugger," he added, coming around the rear bumper, where Merlin stood oblivious to the steady rainfall speckling his brown canvas jacket, hands on his hips.

"That the little bugger you just risked your life to avoid hitting?" he said, nodding toward a white object sailing over the surface of the road.

One way, then another, before the driving wind. Arthur squinted, ducking his head against a gust of rain droplets, and read the words in red on white: _Thank You_.

Damn shopping bag.

He groaned irritation and chagrin, wheeling to slap the car's wet steel skin, expecting Merlin's uninhibited shout of laughter which would last forever and then peter out into random fits of reminded chuckles which would also last forever and turn into a running joke which would be shared at the precinct probably and which would then truly last an eternity.

Merlin didn't move. Just lowered his brows, and his head, and focused a mild frown on the road's narrow shoulder, letting the downpour soak through his clothes.

"Sorry," Arthur muttered. "Geez – sorry, Merlin. Wasn't paying enough attention, I guess. Here, help me push this thing back up on the road and then we'll – ah, damn."

The driver's side front tire was completely flat, courtesy of a visible tear in the thick rubber.

Merlin followed him back down to the ditch to assess the damage from closer-up. "You've got a spare, haven't you, under the lining in the trunk…" Arthur swore, more viciously. "What?"

"The rim's bent," he said shortly. "Look. You can see it there where the hubcap's popped off. That edge. Means we can't just change the tire. The car is un-drivable." He leaned back against the chilly slick grass of the opposite bank of the ditch, and blinked up at his partner.

Merlin's hands stuffed themselves in his pockets. His shoulders hunched in the brown jacket – not even fastened, which reminded Arthur to zip his own windbreaker – as he stared at the damaged wheel, hung down over the exposed edge of the offending rock.

"Gimme a hand," Arthur added, reaching up but looking down to place his feet securely in the muddy shale.

To his surprise, Merlin backed up a step, then two. "You got yourself into the ditch," he said shortly. "You can get out the same way." Turning, he stalked to the rear end of the car again, where he wrenched the trunk open without bothering with the key.

"Hell, Merlin, I said I was sorry," he snapped, struggling back up to the road. "If it had been a dog, would you rather I hit it?" He rounded the back again to find Merlin leaning on the upraised trunk lid, staring down at the overnight duffels they'd packed for their criminal-hunt three days ago. "Did you have to damage the car even more?"

Merlin mumbled something.

Arthur said, irritated, "What?"

"How are we going to get home tonight?" Merlin said, more clearly, but still down into the car's trunk.

"Look, we passed one of those little hole-in-the-wall motels a couple of miles back," Arthur said. "We can walk back there, call a tow truck or something."

He turned to retrieve the key from the ignition, wet gravel gritting under the soles of his shoes, and when he turned round again, Merlin was fifteen yards down the road, his navy duffel slung over one shoulder by the short hand-straps.

Arthur cursed again. Merlin was never moody. He didn't know how to deal with a moody Merlin.

"I said I was sorry, dammit!" he hollered after him, with no other effect that his partner hunched his shoulders a little more. Or that might've been because of the rain.

Arthur yanked his own bag from the trunk, reflecting that it would be nice to get a hot shower and dry clothes while they waited for their tow. Knowing the trunk with its broken latch wouldn't close all the way, he still lowered it out of habit and principle and to help keep the interior dry –

And found his fingertips skating wetly across twin series of dents in the metal skin of the vehicle. Just where Merlin's fingers had been.

He found a new expletive to vent his feelings; Merlin was overreacting. It was just an accident and neither of them was hurt. He was going to make sure the money to fix _this_ came out of Merlin's pay.

But he didn't try to catch up with the lanky figure of his partner stalking along the roadside. Just kept him in sight.

For two miles. And no cars passed them.

Arthur was no stranger to physical hardship and discomfort. No cop was. Shit happened, and then you found yourself dumpster-diving for evidence, or crouched in an alleyway waiting for backup, up to your ankles in what smelled like a combination of various bodily fluids. Animal, vegetable, and mineral.

He was soaked before they reached their destination; at least the rain was clean, but wet jeans were the worst. Loosely aware that Merlin had stopped walking – not to wait for him, but to stare blankly ahead – he plowed into his partner to get him moving again, unwilling to stay one moment longer than necessary in the rain.

"What are you waiting for," he growled.

"We're here," Merlin said, and Arthur blinked in the rain, slowing.

The Roadside Sleep Inn, a row of six or eight numbered doors, the sidewalk that fronted them covered by the sloping roof and weathered wooden supports. Lace curtains in the windows of the front office, red geraniums twitching in the rain in half-barrel planters, a bench for loiterers decoratively incorporating wagon-wheels, now waterlogged. A sea of puddled gravel for the parking lot.

Arthur slogged across the lot, impatient with Merlin's reticence. "You were in such a hurry on the road," he threw over his shoulder. "And now that we're here, what? You haven't got the sense to get in out of the rain?"

Merlin stopped entirely, and Arthur paused, hand on the knob of the door. Rain dripped from thick black hair, ran unheeded over Merlin's face and down his clothes like he was a fountain-statue – he ignored it to stare in the window, an oddly unreadable look on his face.

Arthur shivered. These moments that reminded him, Merlin wasn't exactly human, had been fewer and further between, since the mystery and shock of their first meeting had been explained. And mostly, these days, it was occasion for a teasing joke or a moment to indulge satisfaction at a caught criminal's turn to fear and beg for mercy.

But sometimes…

"Come on," he said roughly, trying to dispel the unsettling moment.

"But there's a kid in there," Merlin said, his voice halfway between protest and plea.

"So?" Arthur barked, as intolerant of the excuse as he would be if it came from the mouths of any of his brother-cops. "What the hell does that have to do with the two of us standing out in the rain?"

"Children shouldn't be in the same room as monsters," Merlin said. "I'll wait out here."

Arthur's mouth actually dropped open. Even knowing what he did, even seeing what he had… his partner stood there slender and soaked and hunched against the rain with such an earnest look on his face Arthur was tempted to make a joke about sometimes the kid was the monster. Not Merlin.

"Don't be an idiot," he said, grabbing Merlin's sodden jacket and shirt at the shoulder to propel him into the office, first through the door.

Ah, heaven. Warm and goldenly lit by lamps, a whiff of spicy apples just discernible from a scented candle. An older man, bald on top, curly white hair else, glanced up from a book over half-specs. The kid perched on a high padded stool next to him – a boy, though his brown hair was in-his-eyes long, remained glued to a 12-inch television in the corner, where a gangly cartoon Great Dane yelped, _Ruh ro, Raggy_!

"How can I help you?" the old man said, with a smile both amused and sympathetic for their state.

Merlin slunk to the opposite corner of the room. Arthur growled to himself again and gave the old man his cheeriest grin.

"Slid into the ditch two miles up the road," he said, leaving out the part where it was his fault because he'd misjudged and mishandled the situation. "Got a bent wheel. Can we call for a tow, and maybe get a room where we can dry out a bit?"

"Sure thing."

The old man reached under the counter, hauled up a dog-eared yellow-pages and flipped through it, fumbling the receiver of the phone into the crook between shoulder and ear. On the tv, a tuxedo-clad, black-caped bad guy was chasing the Gang in a montage of in-and-out hallway doors in a dark castle. Arthur wandered to the end of the counter and leaned backward on his elbows. Merlin had seated himself on one of the lobby chairs, which looked like it hadn't been re-upholstered since the 60's. Duffel hugged in his lap, one leg jigging restlessly, his gaze fixed blankly on a worn spot in the carpet.

The sight was more disturbing that it should have been. He'd never seen Merlin like this. They'd never discussed…

"Sorry, son, you're outta luck tonight, and I'm not just saying that so you'll have to pay for a room," the old man said, clattering the receiver down. "I mean, you can have it all night for an hour's fee, if you like. Roddy's on another call, and his is the only truck in town."

"How soon –" Arthur began.

"Not before midnight, I'm afraid," the old man said cheerily. "His call took him all the way out to Watkins Mill, and in this weather, he says he'll not do another call til nine tomorrow morning."

"If we make it worth his –"

The old man clicked his tongue and gave his head a shake. "Roddy's got a screw in his knee from the war," he said. "Bothers him like the dickens, weather like this. You could swear to make him a millionaire, and he'd still go home to put it up on a pillow with a heating pad."

"A taxi, then," Arthur suggested. And they could retrieve the car on the weekend… but the old man's wrinkles deepened with another apologetic grin.

"Meyer's taxi is what Roddy got called out to pick up."

"Only taxi in town?" Arthur guessed.

"Not even that. Meyer's based fifteen-mile up the road. Isn't another for fifty miles or so. And your light's leaving you."

Arthur glanced at the window as rain gusted grayly against the outside. It was true.

"Have you got any other options?" he said, lowering his voice instinctively, though it probably wouldn't do any good, as keen as Merlin's hearing was. "Any car rentals?" The old man shook his head. "Thing is, I'm a city cop –" he flipped up the edge of his jacket so the man could see the badge he carried on his belt – "and my partner and I need to get back to the city a-sap."

The old man pursed his lips. "Can't even let you borrow my car," he said mournfully, "on account of my daughter's got it – she works nights, so the boy stays here with me."

From the tv – _Like, run, Scoob_!

Arthur contemplated the trouble they'd be in trying to find – beg borrow steal confiscate even officially commandeer – someone's private vehicle. The explanations he'd have to give – the lies he'd have to tell – the trouble Merlin might be in, from his landlord and handler.

"Ambulance?" Merlin spoke from behind him.  
"I beg your pardon?" the old man said, the smile dropping.

"Have you got any medical clinics? Closest hospital?"

Arthur, looking over his shoulder, saw Merlin's lips begin to form the 'b', and his mind supplied the term. Blood banks?

"Are you sick?" the old man, said, leaning forward on the counter to see Merlin past Arthur. "Or hurt? It won't come, else. And they might refuse your request for a lift if the EMTs don't find nothing wrong with you."

"He's fine," Arthur answered for him. "Just a little… He'll be fine. He has a – condition."

Arthur recalled the same conversation with his captain at the precinct, having to be as honest as he could. _Condition. Disorder. A blood disease? - What, like AIDS? - No, nothing like that._

It doesn't make him weaker, he hadn't said. It makes him stronger. It won't kill him… quite the contrary.

_Is he on medication for it? - Not really, just a… special diet. - Like insulin for diabetes? - Yeah, something like that._

The motel clerk said, just as the captain had, "Is it catching?"

Merlin made a noise like an amused whine.

Arthur stated, "You've got nothing to worry about."

The old man hummed skeptically. "Why don't you take the number on the end, anyway?" he said. "Plus it'll be quieter… unless you want two rooms?"

"It's got two beds?" Arthur asked. Just to clear that up. The old man nodded, and he finished, "Then the one is good enough."

"All righty then, give me your John Hancock and so on right here – cash or charge?" The old man pulled out an metal key affixed to a tacky palm-sized flat plastic maple leaf with a faded 6 visible on both sides. "Thanks very much, and let us know if we can do anything else for you, hm? We'll get your car straightened out come morning, I promise – and the weather might clear, too –"

The door slammed behind Merlin before Arthur was finished signing; he blocked the old man's voice and the television: the smarmy bespecled girl saying nasally, _Jinkies, gang, there _was_ no monster_… He snatched the key and his bag and hurried out into the storm after his partner.

He was relieved to see Merlin's lean hunched form heading down the covered sidewalk toward Number 6, rather than angling out into the rain or some wild goose chase, or just disappeared. He was relieved also that his partner chose to wait for his arrival with the key, knowing he was probably capable of snapping whatever lock the door boasted himself, to enter first.

It was dark, and smelled cold and musty. Arthur tossed the key onto the table under the front window with his duffel, and felt for the light switch.

"I hate motel rooms," he remarked, moving to investigate further into the space as Merlin shut the door behind himself.

It was done in navy blue and forest green and – as they all did – reminded him of half-a-dozen crime scenes he'd visited in such places. This one didn't seem to have any extras – no coffeepot, no iron, no hair-dryer stuck on the bathroom wall like an old-fashioned telephone. No fridge, no microwave – though why that would matter, he didn't know, they had no food –

Reminded, Arthur swung around, his one shoe on the bathroom linoleum rather than worn carpet squeaking with the motion.

Merlin was seated again, in the room's one chair, in the corner past the front window from the door, his duffel beside Arthur's on the small round table under the window. In his lap he held his pistol, right forefinger resting inside the trigger guard. Unlike Arthur's service weapon, Merlin preferred a more personal piece, a _freakin' antique_ Arthur usually called it, though it still did the job.

A revolver. Six-shooter. Load each bullet separately, flick the cylinder into place. Western shit.

"Merlin, what the hell?" he said, feeling reflexes shift into cop-facing-armed-assailant in spite of himself.

"I can't stay here," Merlin said. "I shouldn't stay here."

"Okay…" Arthur took several steps forward, keeping the bed between them. "Why not?"

Merlin swallowed, closing his eyes and tipping his head back. "I thought I could wait. I haven't gone this long in… ever, Arthur. I don't know… what will happen. To me. I don't know what I'll do."

"What do you mean?" Arthur said, trying to hide an edge of wariness that kissed his pressure points. Was this explanation an apology to the buffet before the starving man chowed down? But surely Merlin wouldn't need a _gun_ if he intended to… "I thought you said you'd never –"

"I haven't. I wouldn't." Merlin swallowed again, didn't open his eyes. "But… Arthur. Right now your pulse is seventy-five – seventy-eight – and your temperature is ninety-eight-one. And I can tell that from across the room."

Arthur shivered involuntarily. Not because he was scared, or because it sounded creepy – though it kind of did – but because Merlin's tone was so desperate.

"And there's a kid here, Arthur. I can't – you can't let me –"

Merlin's hands moved swiftly and capably, flicking open the cylinder to remove one bullet; he held up the single snub-nosed bit of metal between thumb and forefinger. Then he opened his eyes and grinned – and it was the very cul-de-sac urchin smile that had Arthur first believing in his innocence, fridge contents notwithstanding.

"Garlic's nasty, and I'll burn in prolonged direct sunlight like any other pale-skinned northerner," he said. "But silver in my bloodstream will do the trick." He slid the bullet into the cylinder, snapping the mechanism back into place, then stood, approaching Arthur. Grip extended, barrel in his hand. "Aim for the heart?"

Arthur moved fast, maybe faster than he'd ever moved to neutralize an armed threat. "The hell's the matter with you?" he snarled, snatching the revolver out of his partner's hand. Merlin allowed it easily; he wanted Arthur to take it, after all. "What in our sixteen months as partners makes you think I'm okay with either one of us shooting you?"

"You can't let me hurt anyone," Merlin said, irritatingly earnest and devastatingly casual.

"What if I just cuff you to the radiator or something?" Arthur said. "Or a bathroom pipe?"

Merlin scoffed. "Yes, because that worked so well for you the last time you tried it."

He remembered. The night they met, actually. He'd tracked a killer to an indoor storage facility, and because he hadn't gone unnoticed, because he didn't want the guy to escape, he hadn't waited for back-up before following into an open central space, deserted at night. Except for the two of them.

Arthur remembered creeping through the dark, knees bent, ears and eyes wide open and still insufficient, heart thundering in his chest, pistol and flashlight at just below eye-height. Spinning at the hint of sound, of movement, ready at any minute to stop a bullet – to shoot one himself – coming around a corner to see two shadowy figures.

One body on the ground, unnaturally still. The other standing, raising empty hands at Arthur's controlled-panic bellow of _Police! Hands where I can see 'em!_ Flashlight reflecting from Merlin's eyes and grin as he obeyed – perfectly docile and completely unafraid.

Arthur had cuffed him before stooping to check the other body – dead body, the ex-killer. And spun around at a metallic jingle – his mangled cuffs sliding empty across the concrete floor into the circle of flashlight from the vacant darkness.

"There's a wood behind the motel, we could walk a few miles." Merlin followed Arthur's retreat. "No one would find me, no one would blame you –"

"And no one will ask questions when I come back without you?" Arthur snapped, backing. If it came to it, he could probably bash Merlin in the head hard enough to knock him out til the morning… a few hours, at least… probably. "The captain? Gwen? Your landlord?"

"Bobby would understand."

"And what about me, you selfish ass?" Arthur couldn't bear it anymore; Merlin looked startled at Arthur's epithet. "You think I want to lose another partner? You think I want your blood on my hands and your death on my conscience the rest of my life?"

"Better mine than someone else's," Merlin said quietly. "You'll do it if you have to, won't you?"

"I won't have to," Arthur returned. "Come on, you're stronger than this, right? You can control it, I know you can. A few more hours and then we're on the road again, and when we get home, you can crawl inside your fridge for the rest of the week if you want."

"A few more hours," Merlin repeated, finally releasing Arthur from the oddest staring-contest he'd ever engaged in. He moved back a few steps, his vision distantly connected to the argyle pattern of the carpet.

"You can make that, yeah?" Arthur said.

Merlin nodded, turned away, fumbled for the remote on top of the tv and hit the power button mostly by feel and instinct. He dropped heavily to the edge of the bed and bounced a bit.

Arthur leaned against the bathroom doorjamb feeling slightly shaky himself. "You all right, then?" he said, trying to push the concern from his voice with forced sarcasm. Merlin nodded. "What was that, the suicidal stage of vampiric deprivation?"

Merlin didn't look at him, but his lips quirked in a tiny but genuine smile as he shrugged.

"You know how psychotic it is that you carry this with you?" Arthur said, ejecting the silver bullet and holding it up for reference, before pocketing it. On second thought, he ejected the remaining bullets, then tossed the revolver on the nearest bed.

"Don't leave home without it," Merlin murmured.

Arthur snorted; a silver bullet was like the opposite of a credit card. "And that's _my_ bed you're on."

A flash of amused blue and an attempt at regaining energy followed Arthur as he retrieved his duffel and returned to the bathroom. "How come you get the bathroom first?" Merlin offered in faint protest.

"Because I'm freezing, and mad at you," Arthur said. "And because you're in no danger of catching your death of cold."

A wider grin, though Merlin's eyes stayed on the tv screen as he moved off the bed Arthur had claimed.

**A/N: This was meant to be a one-shot, but the length got **_**way**_** out of hand. So I'll post the second chapter later…**


	2. Blood Brothers 2

**Blood Brothers, cont.**

"_How come you get the bathroom first?"_

"_Because I'm cold and mad at you," Arthur said. "And because you're in no danger of catching your death of cold."_

Dumping his duffel on the lid of the toilet seat and unzipping it, Arthur located his clean things, made sure of a towel, and unwrapped a tiny bar of soap from its paper package marked with the motel's name.

He hesitated over shutting the bathroom door completely – normally he wouldn't think twice about protecting privacy for both of them, but it made him uneasy that he would make himself unable to both see and hear his partner, the way he was right now. What if Merlin left, and he didn't hear him? He finally compromised, leaving the door ajar a hands'-width and swooping behind the shower curtain as fast as he could.

No sound from the bedroom penetrated the hiss and patter of the shower; he soaped himself down in under a minute, then slowed as he tipped the slippery cake onto the ledge on the shower wall.

Listened, mentally repeating every foul word he knew.

Finally called, "Merlin?"

Pause.

_Pause_.

"What?"

Relief. "Just checking," he called back, allowing himself to relax into the heat and steam. Turning so the spray gently massaged neck and shoulder muscles, he leaned his forehead against the cooler tile.

He believed Merlin when he swore he'd never killed an innocent. He believed he wouldn't start now, no matter how desperate his – what did you call it? thirst? dehydration? malnutrition? – _condition_ got. But, he'd never really expected Merlin to make that kind of request. To turn that kind of control over to Arthur.

And he couldn't deny there was a certain truth to it. If Merlin had never experienced this, he could only guess what to expect, either. Both of them could only hope it didn't come down to, _stop me if I can't stop myself_.

And… Arthur himself was the closest human. If Merlin truly passed beyond his own control, who was to say he would choose a stranger further away?

But the alternative… squeezing the grip of the revolver, squeezing the trigger – and Arthur's experience with gunshot wounds told him it would be horrible and messy and agonizing for both of them.

He'd seen Merlin in action dozens of times, but he could not imagine Merlin turning on him. That was the only way he'd do it. If they fought and Merlin was so far gone it was his life or Arthur's. But if it came to that… he doubted that was a fight he could win.

Unless Merlin fought to _make_ Arthur kill him…

He sighed, blowing water away from his face and banging his forehead against the hard tile of the tub-surround.

"Arthur?" Merlin's voice floated into the tiny humid room.

"Yeah?"

He could hear the grin on Merlin's face. "Just checking."

Arthur huffed a laugh in spite of himself. _Dramatic, much_? he scoffed. They'd be fine.

The hot shower and the dry clothes – laundered at their previous motel last night - did wonders for his mood, too, though he was feeling the lack of a meal, himself. Too bad they couldn't order something delivered, in this storm – then confiscate the delivery vehicle, maybe. Make their getaway.

"What's so funny?" Merlin murmured when Arthur came out. He was slouched against the headboard – of his own bed, this time – bent knees higher than his head, arms crossed over his chest, watching some crime-drama, dark city streets and flashing emergency-lights.

"Nothing. Your turn. Why are you watching this stuff, anyway – you don't get enough of it at work?"

"You choose, then." Merlin threw the remote to Arthur's bed, rubbing his face with his hands vigorously. The boxy hotel-room phone was next to his hip on the mattress.

Arthur said, "Ghostbusters?" Merlin raised his head to give him a strange look; Arthur gestured to the phone and drawled questioningly, "Who ya gonna call?"

"Oh." Merlin stared down at it blankly, then moved it back to the nightstand between the two bed with a faint harmonic chime. "I called Bobby."

Bobby was Merlin's landlord. Handler. Sponsor. Whatever you called it. Arthur suspected him of _centuries_, maybe. "What did he say?"

"Didn't answer. Probably out for the night already."

Well, there went _that_ option. Arthur began to drape his wet clothes over the closed curtains on the rod, noticing Merlin had done the same thing with his, over the foot of the bed, and was already wearing dry clothes. "You're not getting in the shower? Aren't you cold?"

"Maybe later," Merlin mumbled. "And no, the bed's pretty warm. I'm fine."

Arthur grunted, stretching out on the bed on his side, facing Merlin. Crossing his legs comfortably and propping his head on his hand, elbow extended on the mattress, he commenced channel surfing, finally settling on a movie that had just started. _Poseidon Adventure_.

"Really?" Merlin murmured sarcastically. "It's not wet enough for you out there?"

Arthur made a rude noise, and turned up the volume.

It wasn't one of his favorites, but there was something about watching drenched actors struggle with the elements while he was safe and warm.

Although, twice he had to bite his tongue on a thoughtless complaint about dinner. _Wish there was something to eat around here_. Pretty callous, if not downright cruel. Macabre, even.

More than twice he'd glanced to see if Merlin wasn't eyeing _him_, with similar thoughts. _Wish there was something to eat around here_. But his partner never took his eyes from the tv screen, even to meet Arthur's glance, in spite of his lack of enthusiasm for the movie.

And the last time he checked, Merlin's eyes were shut.

_Poseidon Adventure_ gave way to _Jaws_. One of the reasons Arthur never swam in the ocean. The other reason being, he'd never been to the ocean. He wondered if Merlin had; he opened his mouth to ask – and didn't. The thought of swimming through murky water in pursuit of a monster who might be in pursuit, also, made him shift uncomfortably.

His stomach grumbled audibly, and he glanced to see if that particularly awkward rudeness had disturbed his partner. Nope, still snoozing. And what time was it? 10:35, now.

Arthur looked at Merlin more closely. He looked flushed. And he hadn't moved – not a twitch, not a squirm – to a more comfortable position, even in preparation to sleep the night through, if that was what he'd unconsciously decided upon.

"Merlin," Arthur tried.

_Why are you trying to rouse him? He's fine, he's quiet. Not chasing people down, not playing with suicide silver…_

"Merlin," he said again, more insistently.

The black-haired head lifted a bit and he looked at Arthur. Dazedly. The blue of his eyes – different. Muddied – murky.

Arthur moved carefully, pushing himself up and swinging his feet to the floor between their beds. Merlin watched him with a distant and disturbing lack of curiosity.

"You all right?" Arthur said. "You look –"

Sick. Merlin looked _sick_.

He said, "You look absolutely miserable," hoping to provoke a reaction. He said, "You look sick – are you running a fever?" Hoping his partner would scoff and remind him, _his_ blood allowed for no illness. Only the one predatory infection.

Merlin only stared at him blankly.

"Okay, don't – freak, or anything," Arthur said. He wished Gwen was there to deal with – no. No, he didn't. "I'm going to –" He extended his hand, bent into a right angle, leading with the back of his fingers. Merlin didn't break their eyes' connection even to glance at his hand, even as Arthur hesitated, expecting a sarcastic protest. Even when Arthur touched the side of his forehead.

And swore, yanking his hand back.

"You are burning up," he said. And felt his heart-rate speed up – he did not know how to deal with this.

Merlin blinked, and a little more clarity came into his gaze. "Sorry?" he said.

"Do you feel hot?" Arthur said. "We haven't got a thermometer – what does your lot do for a fever?"

Merlin unwrapped his arms from his chest and looked down at his hands. Which were trembling. "Nothing. We're not supposed to – only if –" He looked at Arthur, horror entering his expression.

"It's fine, we've got this," Arthur blurted, not wanting to argue another round of don't-eat-a-silver-bullet with his partner. "Can you take an ibuprofen?" Merlin shook his head. "Okay…" What else did people do for a high fever? "How about an ice bath? Come on, we'll do an ice bath."

He was on his feet, reaching to lift his partner, prod him into rising himself – with all the unnatural details he'd become accustomed to with his partner, he still flinched at the heat that fairly radiated from Merlin, like a blacktop under summer noon sun.

"Come on," he said again, hearing Merlin stumble behind him as he headed for the bathroom, turning the cold water on, positioning the plug in the drain. "I'll get some ice from the machine."

Brushing past Merlin leaning in the doorway, he felt the fever again, though they weren't even touching. Snatching the ice bucket from the sink and shoving his feet into damp shoes, he headed for the door.

What if he was wrong, and would only make things worse? For all he knew, it was better for someone like Merlin to be lethargically feverish, at this point. What if his temperature came down – only to end with even more horrible results, that they both regretted?

Or that only one of them regretted, because the other was…

He cursed again, under his breath, keeping close to the front of the motel row, out of the worst of the driving rain, the world a welter of darkness and downpour, relieved by a single light outside the office door, the faint glow of the vending machines next to the ice maker.

Hurrying back with ice pieces dropping from the over-filled bucket and skittering away to dissolve in the rain, he found the water still running and Merlin seated on the toilet seat cover, head in his hands. Arthur dumped the ice into the two inches of water, and Merlin flinched, exactly as if he hadn't heard Arthur come in.

"You've got to – keep me from – hurting anyone," Merlin said thickly. "Arthur – promise me – you'll kill me – if you have to –"

"I'll kill you for being a damn annoying schmuck," Arthur said. "Get _in_, idiot."

He left the room again. And shoving the plastic bucket into the slanted hill of ice chips, his fingers beginning to numb – and shake – he thought, _what if_.

Merlin was dangerous. Would he turn on Arthur, either to force his death – and thereby effectively and decisively protect everyone from him – or to rejuvenate his life by taking Arthur's?

And how far would Arthur go, to protect his partner from himself?

Was he worth protecting, saving? Arthur was dangerous himself, under the right circumstances. Merlin hadn't done anything deserving of a private capital punishment as others – both of his kind and of Arthur's – had done…

Yet.

He'd thought of his partner as a hunting panther, before, but… there was no leash. He listened to Arthur and followed orders and Arthur could not fault his self-control, but… what if his _condition_ turned Merlin from intellect to instinct? Now, or at any time in the future? He had been useful – supportive, funny, protective, intuitive, productive – a damn fine detective and an even finer partner… friend…

Merlin had referred to himself as a monster. He'd not fault Arthur for ending him; he'd thank him for it.

But what did Arthur believe?

This was a lawyer's question, not a cop's. Did Merlin deserve to be punished for a crime he might someday commit? You might put down a wild animal or even a domestic pet that seemed a danger, but Merlin was a man.

Merlin was a man.

And his friend.

Arthur let the horizontally-hinged lid bang shut on the ice maker; he'd made his choice.

In the bathroom, Merlin had made a choice as well. He slouched in the tub, knees and arms braced against the sides, head tilted to rest against the back, eyes shut. Fully clothed.

Arthur hoped that didn't indicate his low level of hope that the measure would work.

"Geez, Merlin," he said, and slung the ice from the bucket over his friend's form in an effort to rouse him. "You know you don't have any dry clothes now, don't you?" Merlin made a noncommittal noise; maybe he didn't even understand what Arthur had said.

When he came back with the third bucketful, the water level was an inch from the rim. He turned the faucet off and stood in the silence, broken only by the last droplets falling into the water, the faint chink and rustle of ice settling.

"Well, just… relax," Arthur said. Stupidly. "Just – marinate there for a while, huh?"

Merlin hummed agreeably, not moving. Swallowed rather noticeably, as his head was tipped back and his throat exposed. Arthur considered testing his temperature again, but his hands were numb-cold from schlepping ice.

He left the bathroom and wandered the bedroom, pacing back and forth. If it didn't work? They still had hours before they'd have access to a vehicle. And hours before they made it back to Merlin's apartment, the neatly-stacked bags of blood on the clear glass shelf in his fridge. He wondered if Merlin had ever broken into a facility where it was stored. Because he didn't see any other option.

How else could they get Merlin what he needed? Before he went either wild or catatonic, and neither of them knew which to expect. Arthur sank to the foot of his bed, dropping his head into his hands.

A headache was threatening; his pulse pounded in his head, throbbing hotly in his temples…

As his heart pushed his blood, rushing around his body. A pint or two – or three? – extra than he really needed.

He straightened, dropping his hands palms-up to his thighs. Seeing his veins blue and subtle and complicated in the underside of his wrists and forearms.

How far would he go? This far?

If the answer was yes, the question became… how far would Merlin go.

He stood and walked to the bathroom on unsteady legs.

And received another shock.

Merlin's knees stuck up, knobby and slightly ridiculous in soaking-wet jeans. And the rest of him was a vague shadow below the ice-covered surface of the water. Arthur gaped.

Then panicked. Skidding to his knees beside the tub, he scrabbled through the floating melting ice for the body of his friend. Felt the silky brush of submerged hair, and grabbed a rough handful, yanking hard upwards.

Merlin's head emerged, his eyes opening – fairly lucid, but not sputtering for air at all.

"Flamin' _hell_, Merlin," Arthur said, collapsing a bit in relief. "I thought –"

"Nope. Can't drown. Silver, remember?" Merlin's sarcasm was faint and worn. "Just - trying to get cool. Like you said."

Yes. Right. Arthur pushed himself up, partially, turning to set his own butt on the closed toilet lid. Examining the water spots on his clothing. And his dry sleeves, shoved past his elbows already.

_Right now your pulse is seventy-five – seventy-eight – and your temperature is ninety-eight-one. And I can tell that from across the room…_

"Can I ask you something?" Arthur said. His voice sounded odd to him, quite calm. Two friends having a casual conversation over a couple of beers.

"Yeah?"

"Is it – hard for you? For me to be –" he waved a hand to help express himself – "close?"

"You mean, am I tempted to rip out your jugular?" Merlin cracked one eye open at him, and the widest grin he'd given so far that night.

Arthur couldn't help but look at his _teeth_.

"Once a week, at least – and that's generous, by the precinct's standards – but… not tonight, no. I'm… I won't hurt you, Arthur. I promise." Merlin's long fingers were bone-white and clawed where he grasped the edge of the tub. Though he wasn't leaving dents yet, like in the trunk of Arthur's car.

"It never occurred to you to ask?" Arthur said.

Merlin turned his head to face Arthur, confusion and Arthur's answer showing there clearly. He was ready to die, rather than consider this alternative.

"My driver's license is in the other room," Arthur said conversationally. And still so very calm, he marveled at himself. Well, he did always feel better once he'd hit upon a solution for a problem he faced, no matter how crazy it might seem to anyone else. "But I can get it to show you if you don't believe me."

"If I don't believe what?"

"That little picture of a red heart." Arthur felt a smile tug his mouth sideways. "I'm a donor. In this case, a bl-"

Merlin must have pushed with his feet, socks soaked with ice-water, for he rose several inches, even as his mouth dropped open in disbelief, and water slopped around him unnoticed. "No," he said.

"Oh, do be reasonable for once," Arthur said, ignoring the fact that Merlin was almost always reasonable; he went on, speaking over his friend's repetition of the negative, louder and quicker and more panicky. "You need it, I have it, I don't see why you'd refuse when I – pipe down, Merlin – when I have every right to – will you shut – to save the life of my best friend!"

Merlin was stunned into silence, and Arthur grimaced at the unintended confession.

"And if you think I'm going to admit to saying that to anyone, ever," Arthur said, "you're not just an idiot, you're a certifiable lunatic."

Merlin was doing a very good impression of a statue in shock.

"Well, let's get this over with, then." Arthur slid a few inches forward on the toilet lid, offered his forearm.

Merlin's eyes didn't leave his face. He was perfectly white, eyes dark and dilated. "No," he whispered. Helplessly.

Half a dozen stupid jokes raced across Arthur's consciousness. _You know you want it. C'mon, everybody's doing it_. _Shaken, not stirred_. Even something along the lines of, _Suck it_!

He said, quite seriously, "Please."

Merlin's eyes slid shut and he swallowed again. Then reached for Arthur's arm.

His fingers – wet from the ice-water – were still startlingly warm. And trembled. Arthur wondered at his own calm, in comparison.

Merlin drew the inside of Arthur's wrist to his face – Arthur tensed – but his partner lightly laid lips and nose to the sensitive skin and _inhaled_. It tickled; Arthur shivered, and found his own mouth was dry.

And his heart was pounding. Odd to think Merlin might be more intimate with the rhythm and effect of his heart, right now.

Merlin leaned forward over Arthur's arm, shifting to rest his forehead against the pulse point. "Arthur, you –" He cleared his throat. "You might have to stop me."

Arthur nodded – foolishly, Merlin couldn't see it, the position they were in – and cringed on a sudden mental picture of his partner going wildcat-crazy and making hamburger of his entire arm. He'd forgotten to ask about possible tendon damage, or how deep –

But he didn't pull back.

Merlin bared his teeth, and bit Arthur.

It _hurt_. A stabbing pain, a crushing pain – felt like his bones were splintering, shards twisting and piercing in an attempt to escape his flesh – and then it receded into a dull throbbing.

The teeth had done their job, some psychotically rational part of his mind said. Veins opened. Now, lips and tongue.

He was a bit glad the pain overwhelmed all other sensations.

And he was doing his very best not to _watch_. He focused on the pattern in the tub-surround.

It might have been extremely suggestive. Subtly sexual. And excruciatingly uncomfortable between two men. Only, it wasn't.

Arthur was bleeding in a self-sacrificial attempt to save Merlin's life. And Merlin was humbling himself, compromising his own principles, because Arthur had decided _this_. Instead of the silver bullet.

He blinked, and the little brown squares of tile became diamonds. He blinked, and they shifted again.

Arthur felt a bit drunk.

The last time he'd donated blood, they'd reminded him, _sit up slowly, rest a bit before you try to stand_. Rude noise_._ _I'm fine_. Then it was like, when he stood, the rest of his remaining blood stayed seated. Until he collapsed right back down to the reclining chair-table-whatever it was, and waited for all the parts of him to work together properly again.

Dizzy. And light-headed. And tunnel-vision…

"Merlin," he said.

His gaze swooped around the bathroom to fasten on the black-haired head bent over his wrist, dripping water down, siphoning blood up.

"Merlin," he said again, forcing resolution into his tone. Whether it was _enough_ for him, it was approaching _too much_ for Arthur.

Merlin growled. Back in his throat, a clear and aggressive negative.

Ah, hell.

He had wondered, hadn't he. He'd offered to feed the beast, hadn't he.

But Merlin was a man.

"You have to stop," he whispered. The whirling sensation increased; he was surprised he was still upright. But he didn't pull away. "Merlin. Please? Stop."

He watched his partner go still, wet hair making trickles down cheeks and jaw, and wet shirt clinging to hunched shoulders. Then, Merlin retreated – inches only, but contact was broken, and Arthur could see a smear of blood on his forearm, one darker circular puncture wound still welling dark red.

Merlin dipped his head again – and licked Arthur's skin clean, his tongue rough and tender at once.

The stillness roared through Arthur's head and the light dimmed abruptly, and he thought, distantly sarcastic – _fainted like a girl_…

He fell for what seemed like an eternity.

And landed so lightly he didn't even realize it for another eternity.

He dreamed that he was sleeping. In a hammock, swaying slightly in the air currents of high summer. The air around so bright that the backs of his eyelids darkened with his eyes' self-defensive response. Sunday afternoon and nothing to do except drink one too many beers, which only made him feel hotter and sleepier and heavily languid in the hammock that swayed slightly…

Arthur opened his eyes and the first thing he saw was his arm. White gauze and off-white tape wrapped around a four-inch-wide strip of his wrist.

Oh, yeah – that. He felt quite proud to be alive, even if that sensation didn't make any sense. He twitched his fingers, happy that they all moved, with only a minor sore feeling in his arm.

Beyond his arm was the clock, a prosaic brown block beside the phone on the nightstand between the two beds, numbers in digital red. 6:16. Early yet, but – they were waiting for a tow and –

He shifted his gaze past the clock to the other bed. Already made.

Still made? Had it been slept in at all? And the wet clothes had been cleared off it, too, along with… the revolver.

He had to move to see the bathroom – doorway open and dark – and on the near side the tv, partially obscured by a lump he deduced was his own foot under the motel coverlet – also dark.

"Arthur." The barest of whispers. His eyes traveled the same route backwards, sure he had missed something, somewhere. Someone. "Are you awake?"

Behind him. He groaned at how inconsiderate it was of Merlin to make him move, lifted head and shoulders off the bed and pillow to rearrange himself, and huffed back down again. He felt the silver bullet in his pocket between his leg and the mattress, and resolved not to give it back to its owner. Ever.

Merlin was perched in the corner chair again – literally, perched, with his heels on the edge of the seat and his knees drawn up, his arms tucked against his chest. His clothes still looked a bit damp, and Arthur snickered to himself at the thought of his friend stuck in wet clothes all night.

Only – sitting in that chair, a yard away from the bed Arthur was sleeping in, all night? Watching him? If _that_ wasn't creepy, he didn't know what –"

But Merlin wasn't meeting his eyes.

"You feel okay?" his friend added.

Arthur almost said sardonically, _Drained_. Before he substituted a more careful, "Still tired."

"We've got a little over an hour til the truck gets here," Merlin went on, rubbing a patch of jean material over his right knee with his thumb, then studying the result. "Roddy said we could ride along, and wait at the garage til the Buick's fixed, and then be ready to go. Unless you want to sleep in?"

Arthur grumped a bit. Too late now. He rolled to his side and sat up. Rubbing his eyes, he realized he was completely clothed between the sheets, not stripped to his shorts like he usually slept. And that was because –

"You carried me in here?" he blurted. And bandaged his arm, and watched over him the rest of the night…

A quick blue glance, and Merlin nodded without speaking or smiling. Which was so unlike him that Arthur nearly made the joke about how heavy he was – dead weight – himself.

"Well, thanks for not leaving me passed out on the bathroom floor," he said in his most ungrateful tone, struggling to a sitting position. Remembering the nurse's warning, _sit up slowly, rest a bit before you try to stand_.

"Yep." The height of awkwardness, and Merlin cleared his throat. "Um, thank you for –"

"Shut up you'd do it for me." Just – get past it. Don't talk about it.

Arthur remembered also – a couple of blonde Oreos and a paper cup of apple juice. His stomach growled, and he stretched tentatively, opening his mouth to say something now, like –_ I could kill for something to eat _– and his eyes fell on the circular table under the front window, curtains drawn just enough to let pre-dawn light silvery-cool into the room. Their duffels had been moved to the floor to make way for a chaos of cellophane wrappers.

"What the hell is this?" he said. "Looks like the vending machine just threw up in here."

"It's for you," Merlin's voice was still quiet, expressionless; he hugged his knees a little tighter. "I knew you'd be hungry and I didn't know what you might like –" Arthur admitted it, his taste in junk food snacks fluctuated too wildly and often for even Gwen to keep up with – "so I got you one of everything."

Arthur let out a single incredulous _ha_! "Hope you didn't use my money," he prodded his partner verbally, as was their way.

Merlin only shook his head. Arthur leaned over to peruse his selection.

"Breath mints, Merlin, really? Gum? Who eats that for breakfast?" Plucking the slender rectangular package from the scatter of wrapped snacks, he chucked it straight at Merlin's head. Not gently.

He saw his friend twitch – and Merlin's reflexes were entirely up to the task of catching the projectile – and the pack of gum smacked Merlin very nearly in the eyeball. But he didn't even offer a whiny _Ow_! or rub his face.

Arthur sighed. Hell. They were going to _have_ to talk about it. "What's wrong? Aren't you all right again?"

"I'm fine."

"Bull-hockey. Are you still mad at me?"

Merlin's head came up properly at that, his mouth dropped open and he pushed his feet to the floor. "_Mad_ at you? Mad at _you_? Why in the world would I be –"

"Dragging you upstate for two extra days? Crashing the car? Tackling you right off your never-from-a-human blood-wagon?"

Merlin's dark eyebrows shot straight up. "I – I thought you would be –" he stammered, then frowned at Arthur suspiciously, the agility of the opposing expressions more typically Merlin. "Are you still light-headed?"

"Look," Arthur said, checking the expiration date on a package of chocolate cupcakes, "the way I see it, I didn't do anything I regret, or that I'm embarrassed about, and you have no reason to be ashamed of yourself, but I'm damned if I'm going to pussy-foot around you for the rest of our lives so I don't hurt your feelings – which are ridiculously sensitive for a vampire, by the way – you got that? Do you have room in your bag for all this – I'm not going to eat it all right now, but that's no reason to waste –"

"The rest of our lives?" Merlin said softly, hopefully.

"Well, as long as we can stand being partners, anyway." Arthur stuffed half the cupcake in his mouth; he was hungry.

"You said it was a pain trying to train a new partner." Merlin still sounded uncertain.

"It is." Arthur swallowed the second half of the cupcake. "And I put up with a lot from you, I really do."

His partner's gaze fell. "Yeah…"

"I mean," Arthur said deliberately, stirring the selection of munchies. "On stake-outs, you snore."

Merlin's mouth dropped open again. "I do not –"

"You never do your share of the paperwork," Arthur pointed out, eating the second cupcake.

"You're the detective, I'm only a consult-"

"Whenever I come over, it's always, _bring your own beer_…"

Merlin caught on – finally – and allowed a sheepish grin. "You're right, I'm a lousy partner, I don't know why you keep me around," he quipped. Launching himself from the chair, he began to gather the last few things into their bags, as Arthur started on a packet of cheese crackers.

"You do have your uses – occasionally," Arthur allowed.

"As do you," Merlin returned the compliment, prodding him out of the way. "You – saved my life."

"Yeah, you really owe me one," Arthur said, heavy on the sarcasm. There was a water bottle at the edge of the table; he twisted the cap off and swallowed a good third of it at one go. Then spotted a small square silver envelope with a familiar logo across the front. He tore it open and two round white pills dropped into his hand; he tossed them to the back of his tongue and drank more water to wash them down, giving a rough and prolonged sigh, anticipating relief.

Then noticed that Merlin had noticed his need for hydration and pain-killers, both, and was showing signs of retreating into the embarrassed self-recrimination Arthur had woken to. He sighed as he went to step into his shoes – still damp – and reached for his jacket.

"Merlin – I'm only going to say this once." Merlin looked up expectantly from sweeping the horde of treats into Arthur's duffel, and Arthur pointed a warning finger at him. "And you're lucky it's once. Well, twice, since I distinctly remember saying it last night, and this is _it_. You're a damn fine partner, and an even better friend, and I wouldn't lose you to _anything_, if it's in my power to prevent it."

"Friend?" A light of emotion brightened Merlin's eyes that Arthur might've – no, that Gwen might've, that was all right, she was a girl – called _joy_.

"Not enough for you, huh?" Arthur teased, accepting his duffel from Merlin's hand. "Well, I suppose, after last night, I could allow – blood brothers." He opened the door to a watery sort of daylight.

Merlin's glance was shy, his smile wide as he mouthed the term, then nodded once as if he was pleased to accept it.

"Hey," Arthur added, as he closed the door behind himself, and Merlin fell in beside him, heading down the row of rooms toward the office. A gruesome thought had struck him suddenly. "This doesn't mean that I'm going to change into one, does it?" He held out his arm, bandage hidden beneath the sleeve of shirt and jacket, flexing his fingers to test the level of fading soreness.

"You can really ask me that, after stuffing your face with chocolate?"

"So that's a no, then?"

Merlin made an impatient noise. "No - for you to become one of us, it would take _you_ ingesting _my_ blood."

"Gross," Arthur said immediately, and heartily.

Merlin, diabolical wit evidently restored - and entirely without bitterness - said, "Don't knock it til you try it."

"Bleh, no thanks." Arthur hefted the duffel and reached for the handle of the office door.

Merlin stopped him, a funny look on his face. "You – you honestly didn't know? You thought – Well, how come you didn't ask first, last night?"

Arthur shrugged, pretending he wasn't embarrassed by the oversight, himself, now. "It didn't occur to me," he said, yanking the door open.

The desk clerk – the same old man, but the boy was nowhere around – looked up with a weary smile.

"Arthur," Merlin said in exasperation behind him. "You're an idiot."

Arthur turned so suddenly Merlin had to back a step to avoid bumping noses with him. "_I'm_ the idiot? Whose clothes are still wet this morning, hm?"

"How was your night, boys?" the clerk said, as Arthur passed the key with it's large plastic leaf – presumably to make stealing it a less-than-desirable thought – over the high ledge of the desk.

Merlin snorted; Arthur gave the old man a half-grin. "Just fine," he said.

"Happy to be headed home?" the old man added, as Arthur fished the correct bills – only damp along their green edges - from his wallet.

"You have no idea," Merlin sighed.

"Well, I hope you have a good trip, when you get your car fixed." The clerk shut the cash drawer with a metallic chime.

"I think we're over the worst of it," Arthur told him, knowing Merlin would hear, too, and understand a different message.

The old man grinned and shook his head. "Yep, that storm last night was really something."

Outside, a tow truck turned into the gravel of the parking lot with the growl of a diesel engine, and Merlin turned the door-knob, holding it open for Arthur with his body.

"Well," Arthur stated, "it's all clear, now."

…..*….. The End …..*…..

**A/N: Okay, I know I'm not the only one to write vampire!Merlin. :D And, if anyone thinks I've got the description wrong, let me know; I had a hard time figuring that out… **

**In the show **_**Moonlight**_**, Alex O'Laughlin is a long-time vampire working as a PI who falls for a female reporter. What I took from the episode was the concept of the two being stuck away from home (innocent blood supply) in a hole-in-the-wall hotel, the ice-bath, and finally resorting to the vampire character taking life-saving blood direct from the donor.**

**Now, even though I've marked this complete, I do have in mind another few one-shots (so to speak, depending on the length) within this verse. Like, Merlin's initial transformation. And, his first meeting with Arthur. Possibly, Merlin hooking up with a love interest (either a Freya-stand in, innocent girl made a vampire and then struggling with the thought that she's a monster… or, another female vamp that he meets in course of duty etc.) Maybe even a death chapter (because I'm borrowing the concept from Twilight and Underworld series, that vampires are virtually indestructible and immortal unless actually killed) that has Merlin dying in protecting Arthur's grown-up son or something… in any case, let me know what would be of interest… and it might be quite a long while before it's written, as I have other projects going…**


	3. Last Call

**A/N: So I did say I would think about doing more one-shots within this little 'verse. Here's the one on Merlin becoming a – well, you know. Chronologically it will be the first of the series – if there are ever enough stories collected to call it a **_**series**_**. Btw, no Arthur, sorry. B/c this happens decades before he's born…**

**Blood Brothers: Last Call**

Merlin lay on the floor.

That was one thing he was still sure of, in the burning hell of fever. The floor was hard and cool, and that felt good. It felt safe. He made no effort to move.

The other thing he was sure of was the music. An anchor of excruciating poignancy, the melodies and counters and harmonies and dissonances and resolutions played around his waking nightmares like whimsically tangled ribbons, pulled tighter and tighter until circulation was cut off.

"Milneburg Joys" made his fingers twitch to hear.

_He bent over the ivories, his fingers dancing and his head bobbing, one foot cocked under the battered piano stool for balance as he felt the lively accompaniment to the lazy sexy melody. Faster and faster, his rolled shirtsleeves pulling at his elbows, his unbuttoned vest flapping over dampening shirt, houndstooth newsboy cap turned backwards and pushed back on his forehead out of his way._

"_Sweet boy, syncopate your mama all night long… with that Dixieland strain… Play it down, then do it again…"_

_Her laugh, low and deliciously delightful in his ears as she slipped her hands over his shoulder-blades, up over his shoulders, down on his chest. He could barely contain his responding grin as she swayed with his playing, closing to the flourishing finish – and he delayed the resolution of the final bent note, to keep that contact as long as possible. And she laughed, knowing exactly what he was doing, and why._

"_You're late," he said, glancing over his shoulder. "Are you ready to sing?"_

"_Every time I hear that tune… Good luck says I'll be with you soon… That's just whyyy I've got the Milneburg joys!"_

Tears scalded his eyes. He writhed in invisible fire, there on the hard cold floor, blood burning through arteries, veins, capillaries. It didn't do any good – he couldn't escape himself.

_She wore a band around her forehead, over her soft chocolate chin-length waves, with a fanciful feather drooped back over one shoulder, bare but for an inch-wide silk strap of dark amethyst. Because the rest of her sleeve didn't start until several inches down her arms. Beads and sequins and lace, the belt slung seductively-innocent low on her hips, the pleated skirt ending daringly just at her knees. Her lips perfect raspberry, her nails soft pearl as she caressed the microphone block, swaying and crooning huskily to the crowd at Bobby's._

"_She's great, isn't she?" Bobby said over the music, draping himself across one corner of the Meister upright Merlin was paid to play the heart and soul out of, six nights a week. "The crowd loves her."_

"_I love her," Merlin confessed, grinning. Wiping a drop of sweat from his temple –_

Sweat pouring from every inch of his body that was burning, burning from the inside, probably the floor was wet beneath him by now cold hard floor –

_\- on the shoulder of his shirt, without pausing the lunatic tempo even an eighth-count._

_Bobby gave him a nod and an approving smile. "Good for you."_

_And Lori's gaze slipped playfully to him as she contined, doing a sly little shimmy behind the microphone stand. "I wanna be loved by you, just you… And nobody else but you…"_

Agony receded. Slightly.

He blinked up at Bobby, sitting above him on a plain cheap wooden chair. Collar unbuttoned, sleeves rolled, suspenders dangling over trousers creased. Face haggard and unshaven. He looked better than Merlin felt, though.

"It's going to start getting better," Bobby promised, infinite sorrow in his eyes. "Can you hear me? Merlin? You can hear me now, can't you?"

"What's wrong with me?" Merlin rasped, and a bit of relief cleared Bobby's round, snub-nosed face.

"You're ill. You've been very sick for… a while, now."

"Why'm I… not at a hospital?" Flames licked him casually, heat rising but not to overwhelm.

"They can't help you there." Fathomless sympathy, in Bobby's river-rock gray eyes.

"What've I got?"

The room was empty, he thought, except for the chair. Wood floor, dust disturbed, slanted roof – an attic? He'd been kept in an attic while he was sick?  
"A… sort of blood disease. A sort of… infection."

"Am I going to die?" His throat burned with the whisper, and his eyes, and the tears that formed and flowed didn't cool either.

"No. My very dear friend… no." Bobby slid from the chair, crossing his legs to be closer to Merlin. He noticed Bobby's shoes needed a shine. "Do you – remember what happened?"

Remember. What happened.

He remembered Lori. Remembered her smile, straight to him alone over the heads of a crowd of strangers. The gold of the ring he'd given her winking on her finger – she was his, for the world to see, as he'd been hers since the first moment he saw her - as she stroked the rod supporting the microphone block before her on the stage.

"She left early," he said.

_Goodnight, Bobby. Merlin – I'll see you later?_ He'd given her a single nod, exaggerated out of the rhythm he was playing. Had he looked up to catch her smile, meet those sparkling dark eyes one last time? _Yeah babe_.

One last time…

He could feel her fingers trail across his shoulders, leaving little licking tongues of flame in their wake, spreading, spreading.

Merlin closed his eyes, seeing fire, too.

_Down the alley short-cut, he hadn't been paying attention. The collar of his coat turned up against the drizzle, the brim of his newsboy cap low over his eyes and dripping occasionally. Thinking consciously of how he could get his hands on a copy of Jelly Roll Morton's "Murder Ballad," with all seven movements. And unconsciously hurrying to get to her apartment. A hot cup of coffee – or tea, this late at night – and after changing from her performance finery she'd be in that rose-silk dressing gown –_

Torn and bloodstained and covering very little of her –

_And her face washed, fresh and beautiful in the natural way he preferred, though her stage makeup did make his blood race when she sang slowly, forming her words with exquisite deliberation - "I wanna be kissed by you, just you" - and he couldn't look away from her lips –_

Smeared red with the blood that trailed from one corner of her mouth trickled from the twin torn slashes in her neck –

_And when she swept her lashes up in a single smoky glance, straight from her to him – _

Dark eyes blank and lifeless, focused on the ceiling, focused on nothing as he skidded to his knees at her side and raised her in his arms, screaming at her to come back, screaming at heaven to give her back –

_His heart thumped crazily against his shirt-buttons and made his fingers tremble on the keys –_

As they were trembling now. He curled on his side, on the floor, staring at his hands – at the blood still faintly smeared – and they trembled.

Bobby offered a blocky glass tumbler of clear liquid, and without asking if it was water or gin, without even lifting his head, he poured it over his shaking hands to scrub them clean. His sleeves were rolled; he couldn't see if there was blood…

"Lori?" he said, and his voice shook too.

Bobby said nothing.

"Please," he said, dropping the tumbler on the floor with a thud. "Tell me it was a dream, it was a nightmare, she's fine and…"

Not dead on the floor of her apartment as the fire crept round the walls and the corners of his veins.

"I'm sorry," Bobby whispered. "I came by after closing, but not in time. The building was already on fire…"

Merlin wept. Pulled tightly together, knees to chest and squeezing – and screaming his anguish and loss – and why in hell didn't the fire take him, too?

Why… why wasn't his skin blistered and burned?

When Merlin could hear again, beyond the echo of his own sobs in his head in his ears like a furious unrelenting heartbeat, Bobby began speaking in a quiet monotone, telling him the rest.

The fire had been put out. Her body had been recovered – the only one killed in the blaze, which was judged to have originated in her apartment and ruled an accident – and buried.

Merlin cried like a child, all over again.

Then Bobby ventured, "Do you remember anyone else there?"

Anyone else. There. He whispered finally, "There was – someone."

He remembered turning from her broken body to see the blur of a man's shape, before the first fist had connected with his face. And even though he was only a mediocre piano player and the spirit that lit his angel from within was already lost and gone forever – _dreadful sorry Clementine_ – he'd fought back.

"Did you see him?" Bobby said, leaning forward on his knees intently.

"No, he… not – clearly." The stranger had been a much better fighter.

"There was – blood on your mouth," Bobby said, and his voice sounded just slightly different. "It wasn't yours."

"I –" Merlin reached up to wipe his chin, as if it might still be there. "I bit him."

"Bull-dogged him, huh?" Bobby sounded tired. "Did you get a chunk of him, or what?"

"I tried." There were tears in Merlin's eyes again, clogging his throat like the thick taste of blood he remembered now. "He… he did it, didn't he. He hurt Lori. And took her. I wanted to kill him, Bobby, but he… I couldn't stop him from trying…" He trailed off. Rage in pale green eyes, rimmed by a darker green. Cursing, as he tried to free himself from Merlin's teeth, to land a decisive blow with the flick knife he held in that hand. "I think he was trying to kill me, too."

"And next? Do you remember?"

"I remember… lying on the floor. And the fire. And –" Another figure entering, unafraid of the flames, but anxious. Then horrified, to find the two of them, Merlin next to Lori. Then Bobby had knelt over Merlin, checked his pulse, laid his hand on Merlin's shirt over his heart.

Wiped blood from Merlin's mouth. To smell it. To taste… and immediately spit it out. Then Bobby had picked him up so easily, as if he weighed no more than a baby, and carried him out, right out of the…

But he'd been burning ever since.

"What I've got," he said, trying for the first time to push himself upright. Trembling and weak and his skin sensitive all over. "Did I catch it from that guy?"

"In a manner of speaking," Bobby said.

"We've got to go to the law, tell them what really happened, find this mac," Merlin said.

Bobby grimaced. "They can't help."

"The hospital can't help and the fuzz can't help, who the hell can?" Merlin snapped, finally succeeding in remaining upright. "How long have I been sick? I'm starving – can I have a drink? Can I get out of – wherever we're at? If the law is going to find this bastard –"

"We leave the coppers out of our business," Bobby said neutrally.

"And what the hell is that supposed to mean?" Merlin snarled.

So Bobby told him. The facts, and the speculation. A bit of his own history and experience.

Merlin laughed at him. Then he got angry. Then he simply sat, slumped on the floor. "Sunlight?" he said.

Bobby shrugged. "Move to the Caribbean, my friend, and welcome. It's nice there this time of year."

"Garlic?"

"Are you Italian?" Bobby grinned tiredly, he knew very well Merlin was a mick.

"Silver?"

Bobby stopped smiling. "That'll do it. That, and only that. There's a reason none of us have gray hair."

"So…" Merlin ran his fingers into his hair and gripped hard. "Not only do I have to learn to live without Lori, now… but I have to do it forever?"

Forever. His angel in heaven, now, and he forever distanced from her.

Bobby reached out and put his hand on Merlin's knee.

"You know only a damn-poor friend would jerk my chain at a time like this," Merlin said softly, despairingly. It was absolutely unbelievable, all of it, and if anyone but Bobby…

"It's been two days already," Bobby said. "Well, it's morning, so two and a half, actually. We need to get you a drink. Come on – can you?"

Bobby stood in a single fluid motion – he'd always been an extraordinarily graceful man – and Merlin took his hand, ready to clamber awkwardly to his feet. Half a second later he was up and steady and surprised.

Two and a half days without anything to eat, he thought he'd be dizzy and unbalanced. He felt it, on the inside, focus shaky, as his hands were shaky, but his body seemed instinctively more coordinated than he'd ever been in his life. It was very odd. But at least the fire seemed to have burned down to a low smolder at the base of his breast-bone. Heart-burn, he thought, with a cynical smirk.

"So if this guy is a…" He couldn't say the word, but followed Bobby toward a trap-door in the dusty floor – attic, then, for sure, he ducked to avoid rafters. "One of you, then who's going to catch him?" He swallowed more tears thickly. "Or punish him? Do you know him?"

"I know a few, in this city," Bobby said, yanking up the wide square of solid planking as if it were a shingle. "I'm sure it wasn't one of them. A stranger, I think, but I'll ask around. If we can find him…" Bobby left the thought unfinished.

Nausea rolled through him, swift and dizzy, but Merlin nodded.

Down the steep attic stair and out the closet door they were hidden behind, Merlin gradually recognized Bobby's house. Second floor, then first, and to the kitchen.

Merlin collapsed into a slat-backed chair at Bobby's kitchen table as his friend opened the icebox, taking out a single opaque white milk bottle. He watched, puzzled, as Bobby opened a cupboard for another squat tumbler of thick glass.

"Bobby, I'm starving for _food_, not –" he objected, as the other uncapped and lifted the milk bottle to pour.

But the liquid that splashed and chugged into the glass was dark red and thick and Merlin could smell it from his seat, could feel the tang at the back corners of his mouth, anticipating coppery sweetness and every muscle tensed as appetite rose eagerly -

He jerked back so fast he almost unbalanced his chair. "No," he said, his throat tightening with a reaction he didn't understand. "Absolutely not. Bobby, I _can't_."

Bobby paused, eyed him, then set the bottle on the counter to replace the cap. "You have to."

Merlin's stomach turned over, and he couldn't tell if the feeling was pure nausea, or deep hunger. Both maybe, and fighting over the incompatibility.

"I need food, not… not… _that_. I won't."

Bobby clicked his tongue against his teeth in a thoughtful way, and leaned backward against the counter, opening the drawer right below his hand without looking. "I've seen some take to it right away, and enjoy it maybe more than they should," he said. "Others resist, and feel guilty… _This_, doesn't mean someone innocent is dead, Merlin, if that's what you're worried about. I've been doing this for a long time, and I'm not a killer. There are ways around the violent side of this… lifestyle."

Merlin couldn't speak. The room was full of the scent of blood and his palms were sweaty and his nerves were tingly-tight and his mouth was salivating involuntarily and he was going to vomit just thinking about it.

Bobby's hand dropped into the drawer. "If you're going to be stubborn about it, I'll prove to you – you need it. But…" He pulled out a revolver; Merlin was faintly aware that he ought to have had a greater reaction to the appearance of the weapon, than the contents of the milk-bottle. "Silver bullets," he said. "If I take you out while you're still hungry and you lose control…"

The world whited out for an instant.

Merlin remembered a customer in flawless white and a panama hat, drunk off his gourd in the middle of the day and nattering on about his safari in Africa. Watching through binoculars as a pack of lions pulled down a zebra. He'd listened with half an ear as he played "Bye Bye Blackbird" –

_Where somebody waits for me/ Sugar's sweet, so is she… _

_No one here can love or understand me/ Oh what hard luck stories they all hand me… _

_Make my bed and light the light/I'll be home late tonight/ _

_Leave your perch and take the sky/ Go take a fly oh little blackbird, bye_…

\- as the drunken, boasting hunter had waxed eloquent about the powerful muscles of the lions, stretching and bunching, the terror of the prey, the gleaming reaching teeth, the spurting blood. So eloquent that Merlin saw the whole thing in his mind's eye; smelled the grass that waved in the savannah breeze, felt the blistering sun baking the earth to dust.

The heat of fire and the stench of kerosene and Lori's blood on her clothing and his hands.

"I can't," he choked. "I won't."

"Okay," Bobby said, expertly checking the revolver before tucking it into the back waistband of his trousers, covering it with his vest. "Let's try the café."

He retrieved his coat and homburg hat; Merlin refused his own jacket and cap as being too hot. He looked at his hands as Bobby locked the door behind them – clean of blood. But maybe an occasional tremor.

His own heartbeat thundered in his ears, and he ducked his head against the glare of the sun, content simply to keep pace with Bobby, who knew where they were going, their shoes clicking on the crumbling sidewalk as the wind shuffled abandoned sheets of torn yellowed newspaper against the base of the brick-walled buildings they passed.

"Here," Bobby said.

He nudged Merlin to shift his forward momentum sideways up two steps and through the narrow door of a little café. The bell wired above them chimed tinnily, and half a dozen patrons – solitary or in couples – looked up at them. Overwhelming him, momentarily, with a thunder of dissonant rhythms competing for his attention; he dropped his gaze and focused on Bobby's voice again.

"Blue plate special. New corn fresh off the cob and creamed potatoes. Meatloaf, and you can ask them to scrape the catsup off before they serve it."

Merlin had the idea that Bobby was teasing, but there was no smile when he looked at his employer's snub-nosed face. Not even a twinkle in his eye. Merlin shuffled forward to a counter-stool, and a man in a dingy apron and cocked paper hat looked up to nod at Bobby's signaled order.

The other diners lost interest and quit looking at him; the distracting arrhythmic thrum subsided a bit. Merlin sat half on the stool, tensely, and tried to persuade himself it was ordinary hunger pinching his belly.

"It stinks in here," he murmured to Bobby. "Even the air feels greasy." He rubbed his fingers on the counter, expecting them to turn up shiny – they didn't.

"That's because," Bobby returned patiently, behind the cover of his hand; he perched on the next stool, elbow on the counter and back to the rest of the room. "You're _hungry_, and this isn't your food anymore."

"Here you go," the paper-capped counter attendant said, pushing the plate in front of Merlin, setting down a napkin-wrapped set of flatware. "Cuppa joe to go with? It'll be a dollar-thirty when you're done."

Steam from the meatloaf – ground beef with flecks of onion – rose and curled in his nostrils. Gravy thick and creamy and fresh, not congealed, generously slathered over potatoes and sliced meatloaf and each kernel of corn gleaming with butter… Coffee dark and steaming and aromatic… Merlin swallowed convulsively and raised his eyes to Bobby's, who watched him unsurprised.

"It'll be the same no matter what's on the plate, my friend."

He set his teeth. His hand trembled as he reached for the fork. The side tine squished nauseatingly through one corner of the meatloaf… Merlin laid the fork down on the side of the plate and pushed it away, slumping against the edge of the counter and tipping his chin up so it would no longer be in his field of vision. On the wall behind the counter, next to the long narrow window to the kitchen, was a blackboard chalked with the menu offered.

_Beef and barley soup. Fried chicken and biscuits. Turkey pot pie. Ham salad sandwich on rye._

Absolutely revolting, all of it.

And he was starving.

"I'm telling you," Bobby said sympathetically.

"How far is the river?" Merlin said, averting his eyes from _pineapple upside-down cake._

Bobby shifted, reading his mind. "You can't drown, you do realize."

"You can shoot me first."

The other man's hand was sudden and tight around his upper arm. "_Merlin_."

"Well, why the hell not," he said tightly. "If I haven't got Lori, I haven't got _nothing_." Abruptly he shoved himself off the stool and ducked back out the door; the bell jangled each one of his nerves, the sunlight slammed into his eyes, and he leaned over, resting against the warm brick. Shaking.

The bell chimed again, and Bobby crouched next to him, one hand on the wall for balance. "It doesn't have to be like that," he said. Merlin didn't respond, didn't look at him, and Bobby shrugged. "You find something else to live for – and then maybe something else – and then maybe something else."

Merlin turned his face and raised his eyebrows in cynical disbelief. "And what would you suggest for me? If you say, find another canary, I swear I'll fight you for that piece right here in the street."

"Revenge," Bobby said. At Merlin's expression, he amended, "Justice, then. For the bastard who killed Lori."

Merlin straightened, eyes focused internally. Seeing that face – however brief his glimpse – the last face she ever saw. His cruelty and selfishness and greed – and he hadn't cared at all. There was no remorse, when he'd come at Merlin, too…

He'd do it again. To someone else, to someone else's Lori.

And. If Merlin gave up and embraced the silver bullet now, there would be no one to make sure. He might as well have not fought at all, in Lori's apartment with fire climbing the walls.

He should have died there with her. If he couldn't have been there to fight for her, to save her… but he didn't. He hadn't.

Merlin thought, he probably deserved this disease. This curse.

"Come on," Bobby said, quietly, taking Merlin's shoulder to urge him on.

He followed in silent despondency, back to Bobby's house. Back to Bobby's kitchen and the milk bottle and the tumbler with its deep-red contents.

Sinking back into his seat at the table, he accepted the glass Bobby handed to him wordlessly. For a moment he held it, the other man's hand on his shoulder, then Bobby passed to another part of the house, leaving Merlin alone in the kitchen.

Absolutely revolting. Perhaps morally reprehensible, even. And necessary.

Merlin closed his eyes and set the edge of chunky glass against his lips. And tipped it.

The taste was not unpleasant. Tantalizingly metallic. Thick and rich. He wondered about who – no. No, he wouldn't think like that.

The first swallow coated his throat, his stomach. Settling him, centering him – he couldn't help the sensations of relief and contentment. The second was easier, and he found he had no trouble draining the glass, if he held the idea at bay, ignored his imagination.

He didn't slurp the dregs. He did not lick his lips.

He did not like the way he felt. Full and satisfied and strong… irredeemably corrupted.

Merlin stood from the table and shuffled from the kitchen to the living room. Where he curled himself on a hard square sofa with scratchy upholstery. Reaching one hand to the back where an equally scratchy afghan was folded. He pulled it over him, and closed his eyes.

There was no fire. There was no dream. When he woke the house was dark, and cool, and quiet.

Alone, and always would be. Always.

He stood, pushing the lap-quilt half off the arm of the couch that was by his feet. For a moment he sat with his head clutched in both hands, staring at his shoes beneath his trouser-cuffs, grimy from writhing on Bobby's attic floor for two days.

It didn't matter how it happened. He wasn't sure it mattered _why_ it happened. He deserved it – he deserved this punishment, this interminable sentence. He could already see how it would preclude love, and friendship, how it would rule and limit his life, require solitude and deception.

He hadn't saved her.

Maybe he was wrong, and this was hell, after all. He wasn't worth saving… but neither was the one who had caused it all.

He pushed himself upright, returned to the kitchen. Being new to this, he wasn't sure how much or how often he'd need it, but… better safe than sorry. He retrieved the milk bottle from Bobby's icebox and drained it with calm deliberation.

Cap pulled low over his eyes and jacket slung over his shoulder, he left out Bobby's back door and walked to the club.

It was early yet, though it was dark; very few people were there, and all employees rather than patrons. He heard surprised greetings – chagrined condolences – and ignored it all, heading for the eighty-eight keys of his first love.

He passed his hand lightly over the ivories, without touching. Every jazzy ragtime tune, every crooning melody, every complicated run… lifeless. His heart thudded a steady changeless rhythm, his fingers felt stiff and rigid. And music, he thought, was a betrayal of his angel.

Reaching above the keys, he folded the hinged lid down, closing the Meister. The instrument shuddered, but it was only Bobby leaning against one corner of the upright. He didn't say anything; his look was both sympathetic and penetrating.

And over Bobby's shoulder, the empty microphone box waiting on its stand on the lonely stage. For now. He switched his gaze back to Bobby's snub-nosed face; the position would have to be filled, sooner or later.

The thought made him feel empty and isolated. Her life stopped. His life stopped. And the world carried on – another young singer with a new job, another musician playing this piano, the audience laughing and drinking – and in a week no one would remember her and he couldn't bear it.

Except, he would remember. Forever.

"Where is she?" he said to Bobby.

"Greenwood. Do you want me to come with you?"

"No."

He left the club. Avoided traffic both vehicular and pedestrian, and walked. He wasn't like them, anymore. And he wasn't prepared to be like Bobby, yet. To ask all the questions and accept all the answers.

Greenwood was dark and deserted. He wandered – there was no hurry – and then it was hard to miss the new plot with disturbed earth. A tiny brick-sized stone set down into the ground with first and last name, and the dates that defined her life.

Merlin dropped to his knees and put his hand on the stone, cold and hard, the grooves of the characters insensate. And wept again. Slow and steady, all his emotion leaking out.

He repeated, "I'm sorry." He repeated, "It's my fault."

Over and over, his voice broken by tears like this stone would be weathered by the rain.

"I'll make it right," he finally promised her. All of it. He would end the man responsible, he would put a stone here that was worthy of her, and everyone who saw it would know she was special, and loved.

"Merlin," someone said.

He opened his eyes and was surprised to see the sunrise gilding the clouds and sky like an impressionist painting, behind the dark shadow of a figure standing over him, hands on hips. The figure reached down and Merlin put up his hand unthinkingly, cooperated to be drawn to his feet.

"So…" Bobby said.

"Have you still got that heater?" Merlin asked him, and Bobby's eyes narrowed in wary suspicion, even as one hand moved beneath the tails of his jacket to the back of his belt. "Not for me," Merlin reassured him. "I'm going to find the bastard who did this. I swear."

"And after…" Bobby ventured.

"Perhaps I'll be free to choose my own fate, then," Merlin said.

Bobby held his gaze a moment longer, then pulled his hand out with the revolver in it, offered it to Merlin. He took the unfamiliar weapon and hefted it, running his fingers over barrel, cylinder, and grip. He'd never held a gun before; so much he had to learn now, to change about himself. To learn what had changed.

"I wish you luck, my friend," Bobby said.

Merlin sighed. No. He was alone.

"I'm not your friend," he said.

…..*….. …..*….. …..*….. …..*….. …..*…..

_Closing time… Open all the doors and let you out into the world_

_Closing time… Turn the lights up over every boy and every girl_

_Closing time… One last call for alcohol so finish your whiskey or beer_

_Closing time… You don't have to go home but you can't stay here._

"Closing Time" ~ Semisonic

…..*….. …..*….. …..*…..

**A/N: Music referenced - "Milneburg Joys" by New Orleans Rhythm Kings (featured in the movie Newton Boys). "I Wanna Be Loved by You" originally by Helen Kane, made a little more famous by Marilyn Monroe, I believe. "Bye Bye Blackbird" credit Gene Austin/Nick Lucas. All popular in the 1920's. Ish.**

**And, this is specially for Vuurvlieg, right now. With hopes that your life can have some new beginnings (and hope) as well as endings… **


	4. Every New Beginning 1

**A/N: Chronologically after "Last Call", and before "Blood Brothers". **

**Blood Brothers: Every New Beginning **

_Closing time…_

_Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end_

_Closing time…_

_Time for you to go out to the places you will be from_

"Closing Time" ~ Semisonic

…..*… …..*….. …..*…..

The night was black and furious, both outside the car and in.

Wind whipped the treetops mercilessly, an impression of shadow moving against the darkness of a sky filled with heavy clouds, occasionally releasing a fat raindrop to splatter on the windshield in front of him, promising a return of the torrential rains which had temporarily ceased. The eye of the storm, maybe.

The parking lot below him – deserted this time of night but for the one damn Honda he'd been following – gleamed dark and wet under useless lighting, pale sickly green. Except for one which was pale sickly orange.

Inside the Buick, Arthur's knuckles were pale sickly white around the steering wheel. He held himself still in the bucket seat with that grip as something inside his chest boiled at zero degrees - a deliberate simmer he'd endured for five days, two hours, and four minutes. His breathing was harsh in his ears, angry and impatient in the roaring silence.

Silence, because he'd switched the police radio off, in spite of the trouble he'd be in when they caught up with him. Silence, because he was alone.

Alone, because his partner's body cooled in the morgue – several lines of the coroner's report burned into his brain, and he could not find forgetfulness in the bottom of a cold bottle or the circle of Gwen's warm embrace. He knew, because he'd tried both, this past week.

Perhaps he could find it in the eye of a pistol. Not for himself, of course, he wasn't that kind of quitter. For the killer. Who he'd tracked to the storage facility visible through the windshield, behind the gleaming empty parking lot.

Arthur checked his Smith&amp;Wesson, under his left arm in a shoulder-holster hidden by his jacket. Badge and cuffs on his belt, though tonight was skating very close to the edge of officially illegal, anyway. He'd be in trouble for this, too, probably. When the others caught up.

He decided not to wait for the back-up he'd called.

Car keys in his pocket, he stood, locked the door, shut it carefully. The noise of a slammed door, even at this distance and muffled by walls, might alert his quarry.

The storage facility was one massive block of a building, all indoors except for a row of bay doors off the back for RVs, campers, boats. This he knew because he and Lee had visited last week, in the course of their investigation.

Ten stab wounds. The stark white paper – the coroner's form he'd seen dozens of times in investigations - the black ink impersonally delineating the outline of an adult male, straight and still and cold and clean on the examiner's table. Not the sprawled outline, blood and chalk, that it had been at Lee's favorite bar, where he habitually stopped for a night-cap after duty-hours.

And the second one behind the bar, of the owner-tender. Lee's friend, though Arthur didn't know him. Single gunshot wound, right between the eyes. Powder burns. Close range. Instant death.

Not like Lee's.

Arthur half-slid down the little hill to the parking lot of the storage facility, the grass just as wet as the pavement.

One entrance. No windows.

Meant the killer couldn't leave without alerting Arthur. Neither could he see him approach.

Arthur paused at the corner of the building, palming the extra key he'd been given, courtesy of the building's manager for the sake of the investigation.

What was he doing in there? What was he getting, or leaving?

Lee had theorized that the killer kept souvenirs from his victims in one of the smaller units. Trophies, unseen and unrealized, yet in so public a place. In Lee's case, his trigger-finger. Severed. The coroner had offered the opinion, cigar-cutter. Pre-mortem.

Arthur found he couldn't wait for the killer to emerge.

He slid the key in the lock, simultaneously turning it – faint metallic grating of the lock-tumblers inside the aluminum door – and drawing his Smith&amp;Wesson.

Flattening himself next to the door, he pushed it open-

Nothing. No sound, no attack. Quickly he ducked around the jamb for a look – darkness. And silence.

Taking a chance, he slipped through the doorway – but no bullet or blade interrupted his silhouette against the parking-lot lights outside, and he took the same position inside the lobby-office to close the door beside him. Softly.

Adrenalin ran high. Eyes couldn't be wider, ears pricked. Nothing. Nothing.

He moved to the open doorway of the little hall that took unit-renters to the open area of the building's core, showing three tiers of various-sized rooms for one man's trash and another man's treasure.

Instinct made him pause, turn his head in an attempt to determine if he'd heard – rustle. Moan?

Arthur fumbled at his belt, found his penlight, gripped it. He wouldn't risk the light nor the required verbal self-identification until he had more assurance of the killer's location. Stalking down the hallway, placing each foot just so for balance and stealth, he reached the end of the hall.

Another shuffle. A sound like that a man might make when he stubs his toes in the dark – clearly from the center of the open area, still dark.

Where was that bank of switches for the overhead lights? Arthur didn't remember, couldn't waste time or the element of surprise fumbling for them. He flicked on the penlight, holding it to the barrel of his gun so they'd point in tandem – he stepped into the clear and hollered.

"Police! Don't move! Stay where you are!"

He panned the light swiftly as he'd been trained – there – there – _there_.

Two figures on the floor, in the center of the open area. One sprawled horizontal, the other moving toward upright.

"Hands where I can see 'em!"

The one rising halted, complying – two pale splotches appearing at shoulder-height to join the white blur of a face. Glint of silver, maybe of red in one of the hands.

The other didn't move. Two. The hell? How were there _two_ men?

"Put your weapon down and back away," he ordered the one who was upright, who had thus far obeyed.

He obeyed again, placing the – knife? – down carefully, with a faint _ching_! of metal on tile.

Ears alert for any indication that there were others, Arthur advanced, slow and balanced and ready for anything, as the man rose fluidly to his feet and took two measured steps backward. The one on the floor didn't twitch. Didn't, Arthur suspected, so much as breathe. Three paces away, he saw the glinting arc of a pool of dark blood spreading next to the silver of the knife, under the body on the floor. He skirted it to have a clear line at the other, staying out of reach in case he was wrong about the one on the ground.

Academy training took over his mouth, too. "Hands behind your head! Kneel down! Down on the ground, all the way – _hands behind your head_!"

Silently the other complied. The penlight was dim and uncertain, Arthur's attention divided, but his first impression was tall, slender, dark-haired, young - _not-the-killer-I-was-tracking, a-killer-anyway?_ – and calm.

Which was strange. Anyone having a gun pointed at them – even by a self-professed servant of the law – was on edge, in his experience. Even the innocent. The mere possibility of a weapons-discharge caused tension.

But Arthur was quite sure that a fleeting grin passed over the man's face, just before he knelt on the small of his back. Tucking his service pistol in his waistband – temporarily – and clamping penlight between his teeth, he snatched one of the man's hands down from his head and slapped the first of the cuffs around his wrist. Then the second. Never an ounce of resistance, which was strange also. Everybody fought the restraints, even in a passive-aggressive non-cooperative way.

Standing up and retrieving his pistol once again, Arthur retreated to keep both in his line of vision, before kneeling to check the other body.

Flabby clay. Cooling neck-flesh. No pulse.

The eyes of the man cuffed on the floor glittered at Arthur as he rolled the corpse.

Eyes dark brown almost black gazed blankly – lifelessly – up toward the rafters. Gray-speckled dark hair, long wavy and greasy. Aquiline nose, broken at some point, sunken cheeks with a week's worth of grizzled stubble. A man Arthur recognized; they'd been after him for some time, now.

Lee's killer, dead and gone. Was it _in_justice, or the very soul of it?

Heart's blood spread dark and sticky and subtle over and through the long-sleeve black t-shirt on the body. The knife, sleek-handled and jagged-bladed, glinted silver and red where the killer's killer had –

Arthur's head shot up, but the beam of the penlight in his teeth found nothing but empty tile floor and the shadowy recesses of the storage facility's heart. He spun, sure he was about to be attacked from behind – instinctively rejoining penlight to pistol – nothing.

No one. It was as if the second man had vanished into thin air – how could he have gotten up off his face from the floor, and with his hands cuffed behind his back, _silently_, in the few seconds Arthur had glanced away – impossible _impossible_.

His mouth was still too dry to swear, and he flinched at the sound of the other's voice.

"I'm sorry." Seemingly disembodied, he spoke from the impenetrable gloom beyond the penlight's reach. "I know you felt he was _yours_. But he would have killed you – or escaped. I couldn't let that happen." As he spoke, Arthur swiveled, fast but in control, through all three-sixty degrees, and even up to check the other levels.

"Show yourself," he demanded, his voice harsh as his heart pounded in his throat. The knife was there next to his boot, next to the body, but who was to say it was the man's only weapon? "Do it _now_, or I'll shoot."

_Click_.

A strange little sound of metal on metal – a reflective glint of some shiny object arcing into the penlight – landing on the tile with a clatter-slide-whisper.

"Good luck with that."

Half a heartbeat Arthur gaped at his cuffs – empty of arrested wrists – at the _joke_? before attempting to locate the second killer with the light. The other half-a-heartbeat, and the front door slammed.

Silence.

_Not_ Arthur's back-up arriving, then, though how in the hell the man had gotten –

"There's no way," Arthur mumbled. "There's no way. No one's that fast."

Slowly – highly wary – he stepped to the wall, found the bank of light-switches, flicked them all in one swoop. The light was instant, absolute, and blinding. Arthur squinted, but the room was deserted except for him and the corpse – he turned his head – empty hallway.

The lobby-office was empty too – and the parking lot, where the access road dead-ended. He could play Cobbler's Bench with the stranger all night, circling the building, so he didn't try more than a single glance down each of the sides. Not really expecting to see the slender killer, he wasn't disappointed.

In the distance, the sirens-and-lights of his approaching backup. He watched them come, feeling the lethargy of adrenalin draining away, leaving only exhaustion. Now that the action was over, questions would follow. Lots of questions, as this was anything but straightforward.

He snorted and sardonically hoped the corpse would still be there when they went to retrieve it, at least.

_**One week later.**_

Arthur sat in the Buick, engine and window-wipers running. Parallel-parked and probably illegally, across the street from a downtown high-rise. Upscale yet modest apartments, a block from the subway and two from the park.

_Splip-splop_. The rain drummed steadily on glass and metal, allowing Arthur's thoughts without letting them go too fast or too deep.

He'd been cleared after no less than three interviews with Internal Affairs. Reprimanded, of course, but he rather thought the captain understood – which was why he still had badge and gun, and permission to track this lead. Someone – he couldn't now remember who – had suggested the possibility of the killer having a partner. It would explain certain anomalies in Lee's stabbing, if there had been two people inflicting the wounds. Placement, and depth.

Without taking his eyes from the building, he reached to the white cardboard box in the front passenger's seat – Lee's seat – simply to place his hand on the lid. On the flat manila folder on top of the lid, relevant sheets gleaned from the larger file.

Who could have wanted the killer dead, and why?

Arthur was working on the assumption of a partner, but without complete conviction. If there had been a partnership, the dead man surely would have been the dominant of the two – unusual then for a submissive partner to turn on such a person so violently and decisively. And there was no gain in any of the killings, financially speaking, to explain a thief's betrayal.

He'd gone back to the victim pool, to who else might have had motive or opportunity or _ability_ either to track and kill the killer – or hire the strange young man to do it.

And. The victim just before Lee – which happened because they were getting too close, without being careful enough – had been a sweet middle-aged lady. A widow with a sizeable life insurance pay-off. Faux fur coat, cat hair trace, sensible shoes – throat mangled – and this was her residence.

An apartment building that boasted the amenities of a hotel – right down to security personnel.

Arthur's fingers closed around the manila folder. Taking the keys and checking his side mirror for traffic before opening his door, he stood up into the rain overhead and a puddle underfoot. He tucked his keys in his pocket and the envelope between his shirt and windbreaker and cocked his head to keep the worst of the wet out of his face, then trotted across the street to the awning overhang, embroidered with the apartment's name.

Revolving door, dark glass. He'd been here once, for an hour's cursory overview of the woman's apartment, which hadn't yielded any clues.

A low-level staff member watered and tended lobby plants, and the subtle scent of coffee permeated the air from a service table in the far corner. Arthur dripped on the rubber mat, instinctively hesitating to put wet shoes on the richer burgundy of the rug beyond.

A pleasant-faced woman, dark hair pulled sleekly back into a long straight ponytail, gave him a smile full of white teeth from behind a sleek gray-white-black granite horseshoe desk.

"Can I help you?" she said, and it struck Arthur that he would be hard-pressed to guess her age even to the nearest decade.

He stepped closer to the desk, to introduce himself and show his badge. "I'd like to speak to your head of security or building manager, if it's convenient." She hesitated, and he added, a bit more forcefully, "If it isn't, I'll wait."

She retreated slightly to pick up a phone and dial it; she spoke softly but training overrode manners and he listened. "Bobby. There's a detective here…" She listened, then met Arthur's eyes and covered the mouthpiece to say, "May I tell him what this is about?" Arthur only smiled – and then she turned away to keep speaking. Finally she hung up the phone and informed him, "He'll be out in a moment."

She'd barely finished speaking, when a door to the side opened, revealing two men. One in a dark blue uniform – Arthur scrutinized and thought it familiar from that night, though the man inside was middle-aged and muscularly stout, but a uniform was a uniform was a uniform – held the door for the other. A young man, Arthur thought. A round, fresh face, a guileless smile, a fine suit.

"Detective," he said, reaching to shake Arthur's hand, and he'd been on the force long enough to know when welcome was genuine, and when it was forced. This was genuine… but Arthur looked in his gray eyes and though incongruously, _old man_. This wasn't some pampered younger son handed one of Daddy's safe assets to cut his business teeth on. There was cleverness there, and confidence even when facing an officer of the law.

He led Arthur down a short hall to a ground-level corner office, black glass walls on both sides, to see the streets and traffic without betraying the slightest glimpse of the interior. Arthur took the chair that was offered in a sitting area, and the other – Bobby, was it? – sat across the gold-and-glass coffee table from him, rather than behind the massive executive desk.

"What's this about?" he said, genially enough.

"Three weeks ago, one of your tenants was murdered," Arthur said bluntly. Not a flick of change in the other's expression, but his focus was absolute.

"You're still looking for her killer?" Bobby questioned, just a bit flatly. Arthur thought, _he already knows the answer to that one_. He let _how_, slide.

"No. We believed we identified the one responsible – but a week ago, he himself was killed." Arthur slid out the top sheet from the file on his knees without looking. Eight-by-ten photo of the body. He set it down on the glass tabletop, facing Bobby, who glanced at it incuriously.

"Good riddance, wouldn't you say? It was in the papers, wasn't it, he was also suspected of killing a police officer?"

Again, Arthur had the distinct and eerie feeling, this man knew who Lee was, and what had happened to him. He only made a noncommittal noise, and slid out the next photo. Before laying it out, however, he set his forefinger on a tiny detail of the wider shot.

"The knife used to kill him." Then laid down the second photograph. A close-up of the knife, framed by the L-shaped ruler used to measure length and width in centimeters. "I'm told it's a silver knife," he remarked. "Rare. Maybe even antique."

"Hm. Looks to me like it might be a fancy steak-knife," Bobby disagreed, with a note of irony. "Quite a few pretentious families still use actual silver-ware."

Arthur let that discussion slide as well. "There was a partial print on it."

That raised Bobby's eyebrows. Slightly. Arthur pulled out the next and last sheet, a printout of the precinct sketch artist's best attempt to capture the face Arthur remembered. It helped that it wasn't exactly an _ordinary_ face.

"Your security officers were all questioned, in the course of investigating your tenant's murder," Arthur added. "Their prints on file as required by state law for their employment. The fingerprint on the knife matches one of them and I'm willing to bet –" he tapped on the black-and-white print-out – "he sees something like this when he looks in the mirror every morning." He was willing to bet the name attached to the prints and the driver's license was false – _Ramirez_? Whatever that young man was, he was not _Hispanic_.

"Partial print," Bobby corrected softly; he must know, as Arthur did, that a partial print did no more good than point a canny investigator in the right direction. He sat back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the leather-upholstered armrest, in a desultory, deliberate way. "Did you bring a warrant?"

Arthur almost smiled. Nope, anything but a college-fresh mama's-boy. "I only want to talk. Ask a few questions." Bobby met his gaze, with a certain sharpness in his gray eyes. "We can't have vigilantes roaming our streets now, can we?"

"Why not," Bobby said. "You certainly wouldn't be the first detective to allow it, conditionally. And I doubt you'd be the last." Arthur said nothing. Bobby tapped his fingers as the moments passed, then suddenly surged to his feet. "Come with me."

Arthur felt like a new academy graduate himself, stuffing the few bits of evidence supporting his pet theory into a folder to follow a superior; he couldn't for the life of him guess what Bobby had decided. Scrambling down the carpeted hall after Bobby, he drew to an upright halt when the other stopped at an elevator, halfway to the lobby but still in what Arthur assumed was an area restricted to staff-access. He punched a button and they waited in silence.

Inside the elevator, Bobby pressed the number 2, and still said nothing. The doors dinged open almost immediately, and Bobby headed back the way they'd come, to a door that must have been positioned very nearly just above his office door on the floor below. Arthur glanced over his shoulder to see another door blocking the far end of the hall; he'd be willing to bet it was locked to prevent casual access from the building's inhabitants, also.

The door Bobby knocked on was unmarked, dark brown paint. For a moment they waited in silence – Arthur for one craning to hear any noise from within – he felt for the handgrip of his pistol under his arm.

"You won't need that," Bobby told him, confidence without arrogance, just as the door opened.

Tousled dark hair, slender frame half-obscured by the door. White socks, faded gray sweats hanging off hips, black t-shirt with – _Snoopy_ on it? of all things. One hand supportive on the edge of the door, the heel of the other rubbed an eye socket. He looked more an undergrad with a Saturday morning hangover than a cold-blooded killer. Arthur would have laughed at the suggestion, if he hadn't been at the storage facility, himself. Subtly he adjusted his balance on the balls of his feet in preparation for action.

"Bobby?" the young man said, his voice slurred by a yawn, but recognizably the ominous sincerity Arthur remembered from that night. " 'M not late, you said I could –" The hand dropped, and a pair of astonished blue eyes recognized Arthur – whose fingers still itched for the butt of the Smith&amp;Wesson - before the young man choked out a rather interesting expletive.

But, simply stood there. Arthur's nerves and muscles tingled – he had ninety-percent expected the young man to bolt. They all did.

"It's your mess," Bobby told him, sounding almost paternal. "You clean it up."

"Skip town for a few decades?" the dark-haired man suggested. With amusement.

It felt surreal to Arthur. Never yet had he faced witness or perpetrator who'd acted with such genuine nonchalance. Both of the strangers treated the situation more like a misunderstanding than a murder. At the same time, he felt his wariness relaxing in spite of training and experience; he couldn't say why, but instinctively he knew that neither of them was a threat to _him_.

Bobby hadn't responded, and Arthur couldn't see whatever expression he wore, from behind him. The room's inhabitant sighed, relenting, and grimaced at Arthur. "I suppose you better come in."

Bobby headed down the hall without so much as a farewell glance, well and truly leaving him to the stranger. Arthur entered the room, shut the door behind him.

"How'd you find me?" the younger man asked, again on a yawn.

He presented Arthur with his back as he padded into the room on the right – the open floor plan revealed as he drew the chain for the blinds. Two black leather short-couches at right angles, round table of dark wood between them – spotless kitchen to Arthur's left, black appliances and dark wood cabinets.

No rugs, no towels. Nothing on the walls, not stolen van Goghs or Star Wars posters. No clutter on counter-top or table.

Arthur said, "I think I'll ask the questions, this morning."

The other dropped into one of the couches, lifting stocking-feet to the coffee table and gathering a throw pillow casually against his ribs. He gestured to the other couch, and Arthur found his feet moving against his will.

"Starting with your name," he added, stopping at the far corner of the furniture to remain standing.

"Merlin," the other said.

Arthur waited in vain, then raised his eyebrows a little and said sarcastically, "Just Merlin?"

Merlin's mouth quirked slightly. "Last names come and go. But I am… always Merlin." After a pause, he added, "I'll tell you the one that's on my birth certificate if you end up arresting me. Fair enough?"

Arthur fingered the manila folder. Usually he had to argue and provoke and trick and coerce the truth, even from perps who knew he'd seen them. "What do you mean, _if_," he returned. "You know I identified you, otherwise I wouldn't be here."

"Is that your evidence?" Merlin asked, leaning forward and reaching his hand out. "Can I have a look?" Almost amusingly childlike curiosity.

Arthur took another step forward, held it out. If they were in an interrogation room at the precinct, he'd be slapping the sheets down in front of his suspect one by one anyway.

"These are copies," he warned, in case Merlin had destruction in mind.

Merlin made an agreeable noise, laying the three sheets out without hesitation – grimacing over the sketch of his face rather than the photo of the bloody body. Arthur lowered himself to the edge of the second couch. "I don't suppose there's any chance of getting this back, is there?" Merlin said, one long forefinger on the close-up of the knife. "You took me by surprise – I wasn't expecting you so soon."

"Really," Arthur drawled, covering suspicion and surprise with sarcasm. Merlin's words at the facility that night hinted at some perceived familiarity, too. "And him?" He leaned forward to jab the photo of the corpse. "Did he expect you?"

Those blue eyes were hard and opaque. "He ought to have."

"Friend of yours?" Arthur suggested flatly. "What happened, you argued and it turned violent?"

"No. He killed a friend of mine. You know that, you were investigating her murder a couple weeks ago." Merlin didn't move, but his casual laziness was abruptly coiled strength. "Killed a friend of yours, too."

Arthur's throat closed for a moment and he couldn't breathe. The blanks fired in farewell salute at Lee's funeral just days ago echoed in his ears.

"I am sorry," Merlin said, quite softly. "I have to admit, I wasn't watching your partner's back that night because I was afraid this bastard –" without looking down he shifted his hand to the picture of the murder he'd committed – "would come for you and your lady, first."

Arthur straightened with a reactive jerk. "You stay away from Gwen!" he snapped. And immediately felt a rookie, if he'd just fallen for a trick on Merlin's part, to find out the name of Arthur's lady.

Merlin put up his hands, palms out. "I swear, Arthur, I would die before I'd let any harm come to her."

Arthur held his gaze, and believed him.

Even knowing how crazy that was – never did he believe a suspect, even sometimes after evidence supported their story – even recognizing that Merlin had used his name without introduction.

"So, what?" he said tiredly, scooting back into the cushions of the couch. Some of the energy of tension drained, he didn't have to chase or fight or outsmart. And this, was turning out to be far more conversation than interrogation. "After the death of your tenant here – your friend – you decided that justice wasn't going to be swift enough, and you took it into your own hands?"

"Wasn't that your plan?"

Arthur lifted his chin fractionally. "We were talking about you."

"Mm." Merlin shifted his gaze to the window, darkened glass like Bobby's office on the floor below. "Please don't take this personally, but in this case, your justice was never going to be enough."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Arthur snapped, exasperated.

Merlin leaned forward over his knees. "Did it occur to you that your killer might be working with a partner?" he said.

Arthur didn't answer. Merlin met his eyes – and seemed to study him, in the exact same way. _Can I trust him?_ The laws of society – one thing and another – would set them on opposite sides of this thing, and yet…

It was the sort of thing that Lee would say.

Both Arthur and his older partner had discharged a firearm in the course of duty. One late night and two deep glasses had Lee's confession, he'd been responsible for the death of two men, that way. In the course of duty. Arthur had missed a similar admission by two inches and ten minutes, the man he'd shot.

He had gone to that storage unit essentially intending to provoke a fight to the death, as clichéd as that sounded. Did a few months of training, a printed certificate, and a public vow really set him that far apart from this man?

"I ought to arrest you," he said. And found that his inclination – now that instinct told him, Merlin wasn't complicit in the killer's crimes – was not to pursue strict justice in the killer's death. Honestly, he felt more like rewarding the younger man. Except for that oath he'd taken, to uphold the law.

"I wish you wouldn't," Merlin told him with frank sincerity. "I can help you if you like – you don't have a new partner, do you? – we can find this second man, then you and I can call it quits?"

"It's not my choice, to forgive and forget, when it comes to the law," Arthur said, and remembered Bobby's words - _You certainly wouldn't be the first detective to allow it… _Other detectives kept criminal informants, didn't they? Even paid them to give information gathered in the course of illegal activities? Charges were dropped in the interests of cooperating testimony, too. The question was, if he was willing to take responsibility for so doing. To defend his decision if it ever came down to it. Even, suffer consequences himself – suspension or permanent loss of his badge or jail time…

Merlin said nothing, simply propped his elbows on his knees and rested his chin on his clasped hands. Watched Arthur think.

"If I consider it," Arthur said, stressing the conditional, "are you going to kill the partner too, and leave me holding the bag?"

He'd expected embarrassment, horrified protest – not serious consideration.

"It depends," Merlin said. "On who – and what – the partner is."

"And whether you think the city's justice department is up to the task?" Arthur said sardonically. "I fully support the power of the vote, but by damn, Merlin, you're only one man, you can't make those kinds of decisions by yourself."

"I can promise I'll let you know before I do anything fatal," Merlin said, so very earnest that Arthur nearly choked on his derisive scoff.

And swallowed the question, _You've done something like this before_? as unnecessarily complicated, for the moment. He pushed himself to his feet and paced the length of the window three times.

Craziness. And yet, in spite of rules and regulations and strict training, the veterans of the force routinely said, go with your gut. Listen to your instinct.

"I've got the file," he said abruptly. "We can take another look, and… see where we go from there?"

"I'm not dressed to go out yet," Merlin answered, glancing down at his t-shirt and sweat-pants. "And I really should shower…"

Arthur nearly said, sarcastically, _yes, please_. Only he didn't know how this strange young man would take that. Instead he said, "Take your time – I'll go get the file-box from my car."

"You want to do it here?" Merlin said, surprised.

Arthur glanced around. It was neater and cleaner than his place – by far – and what he was suggesting could not be, should not be, done in public. "Why not?" he said. "You've got something to hide?"

Something shifted in the younger man's expression, and Arthur was reminded of a look his captain wore occasionally, a look that reminded him, the older man wasn't simply a middle-aged meter-reader going to seed in a promotional desk job. He'd _seen_ things, and _done_ things.

"Don't we all?" Merlin said softly.

Part of the investigation, Arthur told himself. Either collecting more evidence to cement this man's guilty conviction, or build a case for his acquittal based on his contribution to the graver concern of a serial killer's partner brought to justice.

"I'll be right back," Arthur said.

And of course it occurred to him even before he left Merlin's apartment, he was giving the chance to run, to a man who had killed. Was it Hemingway who said, you've got to trust someone to know if you can trust them? If he stayed or if he disappeared, Arthur would have his answer on that, anyway.

Outside, the rain had stopped – though that seemed temporary; the clouds were struggling to break. He manhandled his white cardboard box through the revolving door; the woman at the desk spoke just as he reached the door to the private hall.

"I was asked to offer you a complimentary cup of coffee, before you go upstairs again?" Arthur paused, and she gestured to a seating area in the back corner of the lobby.

"Oh," Arthur said, cop's instincts flaring. "Thanks, I think I'll wait for now. This open?" She nodded, and he freed most of one hand to turn the knob.

Down the hall – deserted, Bobby's business silent behind his door – up the elevator, down the second hall. Merlin's door was stood ajar, and Arthur's senses were all alert as he approached and eased himself and his box into the apartment.

No ambush. No obvious swift changes to the place, to hide something the detective hadn't noticed his first time in. Arthur set the box on the kitchen island, and went silently and unabashedly to the two doors at the far end of the open area. The sound of water running in a shower became audible as he approached, but the second door was ajar there also.

Bedroom, Arthur saw as he pushed it open – less organized than the main area of the apartment – bed unmade, clothes on the floor, a drawer of the dresser open and the closet definitely less-than-tidy. But still quite sterile of anything more personal. The walls were bare; the top of the dresser held watch, keys, a handful of change.

Arthur listened at the bathroom door until he was satisfied there was someone in there, not just water running for the sake of covering deception, then returned to the main room. No stereo, no radio, though there was a tv on a rolling stand in the corner of the living room under the window.

The kitchen was even plainer, at second and longer look – nothing on the counters. No flour-and-sugar or coffee-and-tea canisters. No coffee pot, no fruit bowl, no knife rack. Not even _crumbs_, though the sink was wet and a gray stoneware mug sat drying on the counter by its edge. Casually curious, Arthur opened a few of the cabinets – also absolutely bare. Okay, so maybe a young bachelor wouldn't keep a blender and a food processor and a set of baking dishes like Gwen had in their kitchen cupboards, but – no toaster? No dishes at all? Nothing even in the _pantry_?

"What are you doing?" Merlin's tone was sharp.

A single shock ran along Arthur's nerves, but he didn't let it show – startled or guilty or embarrassed. He turned, letting the last door bang hollowly shut. Merlin was dressed in jeans and loafers, a white polo shirt with horizontal pencil-stripes in shamrock green – no more _psycho-killer_ than his Snoopy t-shirt.

"Regular Mother Hubbard, aren't you?" he observed. "How long have you lived here?"

"A while," Merlin said. And _now_, he was wary. Completely nonchalant about admitting to crimes like stalking and murder – the tension was going to be over the state of his _kitchen_?

They stood for a moment in silence; Arthur would learn more by what Merlin said or did – or didn't – in the situation, than by talking, taking control of it himself.

"You didn't want coffee?" Merlin said then, pushing his hands through his wet hair in lieu of a comb, then giving his head a shake. He padded to the couch again, and Arthur found himself lifting the box to bring it to the room with greater light, and seating.

"You don't have any?" Arthur thought of that one mug, used and washed, as he set the box down on the coffee table.

Merlin shook his head, attention on the evidence. "I don't drink it," he answered absently.

Arthur lifted the lid of the box, and then all else was lost in the avalanche of information. Useless, vital, elusive, maddening, obvious, overwhelming, puzzling. They scrutinized in silence, they discussed, they argued – one fumed and the other teased, then they switched and the second teased while the first fumed.

Then Arthur's stomach pinched and protested, and he glanced at his watch to realize that it was three in the afternoon.

"Hell!" he said cheerfully, slapping down the list of witnesses for the murder prior to the middle-aged tenant of Merlin's building, and moving around the edge of the couch Merlin had been sitting on. "Have you got anything to eat around here? I'm starving!"

He realized that he felt at least as comfortable with Merlin after the morning's work as any number of rookies he'd ridden with on temporary assignment. The thought contented him more than it bothered him, until Merlin – startled from a quarter-hour's brown-study silence – shot to his feet and spun around.

"No!" he said, sharply.

Arthur turned, still reaching for the handle of the refrigerator. "Geez, I'm not asking you to cook for me," he said, a bit annoyed but willing to let it become another joke. "Just – bread and cheese and mustard for a sandwich."

"I don't have it," Merlin insisted, still sharply. "You can – order out or something, I'll pay."

Arthur didn't retreat, narrowing his eyes. Why should the suggestion of Arthur making a sandwich in his kitchen concern Merlin more than the suggestion of arrest for homicide?

"Anyway, I think I might have something here," Merlin added. More calmly, but Arthur couldn't help but wonder. One of the risks of showing the information to someone like this strange young man, who'd already proven himself able and willing to act outside the law. Whether he'd share a theory for official pursuit or keep it to himself. And whether he'd made the choice now just to distract Arthur.

"What then?" Arthur asked, his steps slow and reluctant to return.

Merlin held up a photo, and Arthur recognized it instantly. The one survivor. A skinny tattooed forklift operator, attacked and left for dead, his testimony at times incoherent and at times contradictory – the only thing linking him to the other murders was the weapon used, a distinctive two-pronged thing like a meat fork.

"I think he's the partner," Merlin said. "Delbert Keefe."

"What?" Arthur said. "He was a victim."

"I don't think so," Merlin disagreed, flipping the photo to concentrate on the hospital report that accompanied it. "I think this was – more deliberate. A smoke screen, even. The only time the killer was interrupted, and Keefe's injuries not life-threatening…"

Maybe, but it was such a long shot, on such flimsy reasoning… Arthur said, "There's more. Isn't there."

Merlin shrugged, toying with the pages and not meeting Arthur's eyes. "Just a funny feeling, but I think you should –"

"Bull-hockey."

Something fishy. Maybe Merlin was not the partner himself, but he wasn't just a random security-guard-with-a-hero-complex, either. Merlin knew something, Arthur was sure now, the only question was how.

"You're not telling me something, and it's a big something," he said, prowling around the second couch. "You went after this guy because you didn't think we could catch him or hold him or make the charges stick or something." He fished into the bottom of the almost-empty white cardboard evidence box, and his fingers found what he was looking for – a pair of cold metal rings. "Has it got anything to do with this?"

He flung the mangled cuffs at Merlin, who caught them in a sure, instinctive move, though his expression was still startled.

"That," Arthur said, pointing at the bent metal, "is impossible. No tool marks."

"I'm just… really strong," Merlin said lamely.

Arthur scoffed. Merlin's body was lean and wiry rather than muscular, but still. Unless he was _on_ something… that he wanted to hide… and another piece clicked into place in Arthur's brain. And he headed for the kitchen again.

Merlin reached the fridge just as Arthur did – no flyers, no takeout menus, no magnets at all – and held the door shut with one hand, fingers splayed across the shiny black surface. Which should have been impossible, too, his angle was all wrong. None of his body weight behind that hold, and all of Arthur's pulling to open the door. Which didn't budge.

"Please," Merlin said, and there was an odd desperation in his eyes. "Please don't."

"What are you hiding?" Arthur said flatly. He stopped pulling but didn't drop his hand. "Have I got to arrest you after all?"

"It's just –" Merlin spoke very quickly, all at once. "I have a condition and I'm on a special diet for it and it's sort-of contagious and your killer had it, too – that's why I was after him, because most people don't understand and won't believe and if you didn't you couldn't hold him for trial or effective execution so we just usually take care of it ourselves." He took a breath; Arthur felt his eyebrows reaching for his hairline.

"A _condition_," he said sarcastically. "That makes you strong and violent and immune to potassium chloride?"

Merlin silently offered the cuffs; Arthur stared down at them. Merlin's hand began to slide away from the refrigerator door. "I swear to you, I _swear_ to you, I've never hurt an innocent human being."

It was a very odd thing to say. And highly improbable, how Arthur believed him. For a moment after Merlin's hand had dropped, he only held the younger man's gaze. Then he opened the refrigerator.

Empty. And pristine. Except for the second glass shelf, far to the left. A stack of flat clear bags with a dark red liquid inside.

Unmistakable, but…

The connections seemed nightmarishly slow. _He's a… He thinks he's a_…

Merlin was speaking swiftly again. "There's a scientific – medical – explanation for it, of course, but the gist is there's a lack of a certain component in the blood, caused by an infection. _This_ is the only way to resupply that component – correct the imbalance – it's a bit like craving salt when your electrolytes are low. Quite a lot of us prefer this sort of harmless second-hand acquisition for survival, but there are a few who embrace the stereotype or enjoy the high of the hunt, or… whatever. We do our best to protect the city from –"

"You're a v-" He couldn't say the word.

"Yes." Merlin was watching him with the stillness of a stalking cat.

Only, Arthur wasn't _afraid_. Just… stunned.

Was that why his hand was on the grip of his Smith&amp;Wesson under his left arm.

Merlin noticed. "You can, if you like," he said. Shyly, as if he was embarrassed. "If it makes you feel more comfortable to try. It's just… if the bullet isn't silver, it won't do any good. The silver reacts with the virus in the blood, you see, and -"

"So what?" Arthur managed. "My bullets will just bounce off your chest?"

"Oh no, they'll go through. It'll hurt like hell and I'll bleed… but I'll heal. Another of the side effects, actually, increased rate of healing, maybe as much as two hundred percent…"

Arthur looked into twin pools of deep and earnest blue and saw that Merlin at least believed it. And Arthur could hardly shoot a man to test the theory; he didn't even have a warrant, after all. No one knew he was here, and whatever bizarre explanation Merlin gave, at least it seemed he was capable of twisting metal handcuffs with his bare hands. In a matter of seconds.

He didn't know what he was going to do.

Silently he retreated to the living room, being careful not to turn his back on the other man, though Merlin remained in place beside the refrigerator. He felt Merlin's eyes on him as he repacked – carelessly, haphazardly – his file box. Hefting it, he moved to the door and felt for the knob.

"The partner," he said into the silence, "isn't one?" Merlin shook his head. Arthur didn't question how he might or might not know that. "Stay out of it, then."

He closed the door behind him, heard no sound from the apartment. Rode the elevator alone, ignored the lobby attendant on his way out.

It was raining again, moisture drizzling down from an overcast gray sky; the hum of downtown traffic mingled with the throb of a beginning headache. He dropped the box in the Buick's trunk, and collapsed into the driver's seat.

**A/N: Okay, some people hinted that they'd like to see crime-fighting, case-working Merlin&amp;Arthur in this crazy 'verse. How's this for a sample? Again, the chapter went too long, so it's split in half… second part of "Every New Beginning" coming soon… **


	5. Every New Beginning 2

**Every New Beginning, cont.**

_Arthur dropped the box in the Buick's trunk, and collapsed into the driver's seat._

And cracked his elbow on his door flinching as the passenger door opened without warning to admit – Bobby the building manager, of all people. Pain lanced belatedly up his arm as the other man slammed the door on the wet outside and turned to look him in the eye, serious as a heart attack. Arthur noticed he had a black leather-bound book in one hand.

"What are you going to do about Merlin?" he said without preamble.

Arthur opened his mouth to say, _what do you mean_, or something equally opaque, but Bobby cut him off.

"He told me. About this morning – and last week. I've known Merlin a long time – he deserves a lot better than he's gotten out of life, so I need to know if you're planning on making it harder for him."

"I – haven't decided," Arthur said stiffly, recognizing that Bobby had a lack of awe for his detective's badge similar to Merlin's. He wondered if it was going to be possible simply to pretend he'd never met either, and forget.

"You don't believe him," Bobby guessed shrewdly. "You think he's crazy – and that makes you wonder if you can let him walk, risk him hurting someone innocent, next time."

"You _do_ believe him?"

Unperturbed, Bobby opened the black leather book. A photo album, Arthur saw, though the angle and the speed of perusal prevented him from seeing any of them clearly. "Merlin was born at the turn of the century," he said. "I met him in 1922 – or '23, was it? He was quite a talented musician – he played piano in a joint I owned. You never heard jazz played like that, with such feeling and life – sly or exuberant, whimsical or compelling…"

Bobby let the page fall open to a sepia-tinted photo. A street-front, with a double row of people obscuring the rather plain-looking building behind. Bobby's finger tapped one of the men in the back row.

Shirtsleeves rolled mid-forearm, vest hanging open, newsboy-style cap over shaggy dark hair. Brilliant street-urchin grin. Clearly Merlin.

Two people down – Bobby, in a dapper round hat, vest buttoned properly under the jacket of a period 3-piece. "You could have the photo tested and dated, but it's genuine," Bobby said casually. "This was only a couple of months before Merlin… became one of us."

"What –" Arthur's mouth was dry; he couldn't articulate the question, but Bobby anticipated. Leaning over, he tapped the picture – a young girl in front of Merlin, dressed as a flapper, but with an air of fresh enthusiasm, rather than jaded cynicism.

"Our stage-singer," he said. "Incredible potential, both of them, and _together_…" Bobby was smiling even at the memory. So _old_, if he was telling the truth. "She was killed. One of us, but one of the predators. She's why he'd never consider taking what he needs from a person directly – even if I hadn't taught him better than that…" His smile turned wry. "She's why he hunts those of our kind who kill."

Arthur lifted his head to look blindly out – or rather, _at_ the rain-streaked window.

_You certainly wouldn't be the first detective to allow it…_

"Did you ever find who did it?" he asked vaguely.

"Yes. Didn't take long, actually, Merlin seems to have a knack for that sort of work, though he's had quite a long time to develop it, now."

_Detective work_, Arthur thought, and, _yeah, I thought so too_…

"Merlin says you're a good man," Bobby said.

Arthur made a bitter, skeptical sound. "Merlin doesn't know me."

"Research," Bobby said mildly, and Arthur wasn't offended – much of his work was a matter of public record, if anyone chose to look. "Since this particular rogue came to our attention. We're… going to keep doing what we do, with or without your cooperation, you know. I suppose, if you get very nasty about it, we'll have to disappear. Find a new city to protect…"

Arthur frowned. "How bad is it?" he said. "How often –"

Bobby waved a negligent hand – business tycoon with the face of a high-school senior. "One or two a year."

Absolutely unbelievable. Though, fairly undeniable, also. Arthur said, "I won't make problems for you, if you don't make problems for me." Bobby made a sound of agreement and reached for the door handle. "Only – tell him to be more careful about leaving evidence, from now on?"

"Hm. Usually he is." Bobby gave Arthur a narrow, considering look.

"What?" Arthur said.

"Nothing. Just… thank you. And good luck."

_**One week later.**_

Arthur sat in the Buick at the head of the first row of aluminum sheds, rather ignominiously termed _homes_ \- in the trailer park. No grass, no trees, no kids – one hoped, because of the dirt and trash and absolute desolation of the place.

Here he expected to find the partner, Delbert Keefe – skinny, tattooed forklift operation who hadn't gone home or to work in a week. A cousin of a friend of an old teammate or some such lived out here – the sort of place where the manager would take a bribe from Arthur for directions and from the perp at the same time, to conceal him. Lying to them both, with the result that Arthur's quarry would probably slip away.

So Arthur was dressed in a pair of jeans with holes at the knees and stains of both paint and grease, and a blue shirt that had seen better decades. Blending in, while he scouted out the park. Which was a really incongruous name for the reality.

He left the car behind to begin to saunter the row, lit cigarette trailing smoke hung between his lips, hands stuffed in his pockets, ball cap turned backward on his neck. He sauntered for two hours, watchful, avoiding direct notice of fat women in curlers and house-dresses taking out garbage, and unemployed young men who gathered in draggled, wary knots.

And then found, on the last row, nearly hidden beneath a tattered blue tarp, the motorbike – because motorcycle was too grand a word for that p.o.s. – with the license plate he was looking for, a possible vehicle borrowed from the teammate or friend or cousin or someone.

Sweat trickled down his back, around the pistol behind his belt. He circled the place once, noticing the back door and the bike's proximity and positioning. If he tried to swiftly or subtly disable the vehicle, someone inside or around could take him by surprise, making trouble. If he went to the door…

He shrugged and went to the door, wishing he had a partner to cover the back exit.

No doorbell. He knocked on the crooked front door and waited, trying to look shifty and disreputable.

And then – out of sight around the corner of the trailer – the motorbike roared to life.

"Dammitdammitdammit!" he cursed, leaping down the steps all at once – and rounding the corner two paces from the skinny tattooed Keefe.

Whose guilt and fear and recognition were plain on his face – twisted savagely as he risked his balance to try to run Arthur down. Arthur dove and rolled – and knew he was going to lose the bastard, it was too late he was too slow.

He sprinted anyway into the dust cloud. Hollering the usual identification and command – knowing it would be disregarded – wondering if he could justify pulling his piece and squeezing off a few shots.

The motorbike reached the end of the row, bending nearly horizontal to make the dusty turn. Arthur's steps slowed reactively; the repetitive cursing of failure tasted bitter. The highway was a quarter-mile; with that head start, Arthur could _never_ –

And then a car spun up next to him. His Buick – passenger door open – and Merlin bent low to call from the driver's seat, "Get in!"

The tires were turning, grinding in the dirt before he even had the door slammed shut.

"What the hell?" he panted. "Have you been following me?" _Did you just hotwire my car?_ The keys were still in his hip pocket.

Merlin spun the wheel to make the turn, leaving the trailer park for the road beyond, the tires slipping – gripping - Arthur braced himself with one hand on the dashboard, one foot pushed into the foot-well, his Smith&amp;Wesson pushed into his tailbone uncomfortably.

"Not really," Merlin said shortly, his attention out the front window as he shifted and accelerated without any consideration for the Buick's age. "It's just – Keefe knows too much about –" another sharp turn, to the highway on-ramp – "about _us_, and…" Quick flash of blue as Merlin spared him a glance. "You don't have another partner, yet."

"What the hell difference does –" Arthur spat an involuntary curse as Merlin swung unconcernedly in and around traffic – blaring horns – as if he handled a motorbike as well, instead of a sedan.

"Can we light a cherry?" Merlin asked.

"No," Arthur said crossly, still bracing himself for an impact that would _surely_ come any minute. "They took it after that night in the warehouse – I have restrictions now, because of you." That revolving red light signaling _clear the road for an official vehicle _would've come in handy just about now, too.

Facing forward, Merlin grinned wide and cheerfully unrepentant.

"So I guess the sunlight thing is a myth?" Arthur said sarcastically, mostly to distract himself from their proximity to other cars' bumpers.

"What?" Merlin swerved across three lanes of traffic to follow the bike to an off-ramp, an unexpected move that shifted Arthur's attention from the driver of his car, back to their quarry.

"Where's he going?" Arthur said, mostly to himself.

"He's probably figured he can't lose us on the highway," Merlin murmured, skidding the Buick through a red light and between a taxi and a delivery truck.

"Rush hour traffic," Arthur realized. "He's going downtown."

"Hold on," Merlin told him grimly, shifting gears again.

Arthur couldn't seem to get a full sentence out, after that, nor one clean of expletives. "Watch out for the–" and "Careful, you–" "There's a–" "Hell–look out for–"

Til he realized. No collateral damage, in all the close calls. Not so much a dinged bumper, or a secondary collision after they'd passed, though the Buick had never been driven so hard. If it wasn't for his perception of possibilities – and the jerking of the car, the growling protest of the abused motor and screech of the tires – he'd have probably felt perfectly safe.

"The bridge," Merlin said, with fatalistic calm, a moment before Arthur realized, himself. "Aye, _damn_."

All lanes crowded, slowed to a crawl, typical for this time of day. Merlin laid on the horn for the first time, tried to change lanes to move ahead – and the motorbike slipped over the dotted yellow line. Slowed, but still able to go about three times as fast as they could go – Keefe looked back to give them an unmistakable grimace of triumph. Motorists honked their ill will at the less-than-legal advantage taken – but their suspect was getting away nevertheless.

Merlin leaned forward to look upward at the structure of the bridge above them. "You drive," he said shortly, shifting to park and reaching to open the driver's door. "I'll be right back."

With that, he was gone.

Arthur cursed each individual involved in this turkey-shoot case, clambering over the gear shift to the driver's seat, slamming the door, shifting to drive. He craned to look as the red taillights in front of him dulled briefly – they all rolled forward a few car lengths – but couldn't see where Merlin had gone.

Until he leaned forward and looked up, as Merlin had done. Then, he only saw the younger man – wait, _older_, turn-of-the-century, Bobby claimed – by the flash of pale skin below the short sleeves of his black Snoopy t-shirt.

Running, in the system of girders that supported the bridge. Thirty, maybe forty feet in the air, and never intended for human use – and Merlin was leaping from one to the next, running above the traffic as sure as a squirrel on a powerline.

His heart shot up toward his mouth, but his throat was too dry to allow passage – he stopped breathing for a moment – and then Merlin was out of sight.

Oh, hell. Oh, damn. What was he supposed to do now? If Merlin fell – if he didn't…

Red light flared across all lanes, and he stomped on the brake too. Ahead, as far as he could see, a man stood up out of his car, facing forward – then another, two lengths back and in a different lane.

Arthur couldn't stand not knowing. He threw the Buick into park and stood up also, between car and door, on the kick-plate for greater height. More people were out of their vehicles, and Arthur caught a few shouts of information passed back along the traffic jam.

"Citizen's arrest, they said."

"What?"  
"You ever seen that? You ever even heard of somebody doin' that?"

"Hey, was that a shot? Dude over here says he heard a gunshot."

"Who was shot?"

And then, a faint shout – a short pause – and, "Arthur, he said. Who's Arthur? Dunno, he's calling for Arthur."

Slamming the Buick's door, Arthur fumbled his badge from his back pocket and sidled as swiftly as he could between cars essentially parked on the bridge.

"Police. Get back in your cars. Everything's under control. _Police_."

He saw Merlin. On his feet, but looking down at the pavement, one hand on his hip. He looked pale, rather than flushed – and as he glanced up to find Arthur approaching, an expression of almost feral satisfaction shifted to a more innocent relief.

Arthur cleared the last vehicle. There was an open space, where cars ahead had pulled forward; faces gawked from all the windows. The skinny tattooed Keefe on his back on the street - next to the tipped, scarred motorbike, and a handgun a short way off – his hands raised, shaking, the crotch of his trousers wet.

Huh. He kind of wished he'd seen whatever Merlin had done to cause that… or maybe not.

"Face down," Arthur ordered, showing his badge though Keefe clearly knew who he was. "Hands behind your back…" Beside him, Merlin gave a little murmur of amusement, and Arthur had to fight his own smile, remembering their first meeting. "You have the right to remain silent…"

Sirens sounded in the distance as he snapped his replacement pair of handcuffs on the Mirandized suspect. He wrinkled his nose at the man's stench as he straightened, thinking he'd wait and let someone else drive the jackass back to central booking.

"You all right?" he asked Merlin.

"Yep."

But his eyes were drawn to that one hand, still on Merlin's hip. Was the black material of his shirt shiny-wet? Was the inside of Merlin's hand stained red? Arthur's heart twisted in his chest – _dude over here says he heard a gunshot_ – and for an instant he saw Lee's body mangled on the floor of the bar.

"Is that –" he managed; his lips felt stiff. "Did he –"

"Just clipped me," Merlin said. "I'll be fine – I shouldn't stick around, though, d'ya think." He began to move away – not dropping the hand, but controlled and steady, even light on his feet.

"Merlin –" Arthur said. All the questions and advice clogging together in his throat.

The younger man tossed him a grin over his shoulder, innocent and young. "Congratulations on your collar, Detective," he said. "I'll see you around."

And Arthur watched him blend into the crowd of spectators on the traffic-jammed bridge.

_**One day later.**_

Arthur strode down one of the hallways of the precinct's second floor, back toward the observation room, which was separated from interrogation by a one-way window. His stomping footsteps and his speed betrayed his frustration; he kept his cursing internal.

Jackass partner wasn't saying squat.

They could make a handful of lesser charges stick, but there was nothing definitive linking Delbert Keefe to the dead killer – vampire, according to Merlin, but that was probably inadmissible also – and only circumstantial in regard to the other victims, or the storage unit.

Luckily it had been a citizen who'd taken him down, so his bleating about police brutality found no legal sympathy. Arthur privately wished him a grim good luck trying to sue Merlin.

Another reason for stomping and swallowing invective in his – very public – workplace. Showing up at the apartment building hours after the fiasco of the arrest yesterday, he hadn't gotten past the polite desk attendant. No, Merlin wasn't answering his phone. And no, Bobby was busy and couldn't spare a minute to speak to Arthur.

At least he had confirmation that the younger – nope, not younger – man, had in fact made it home. Which probably meant that he would be fine… probably.

He was hailed from behind just as he reached the end of the hall, and spun about to see one of the other detectives leaning out into the corridor.

"You waiting on a guest?" the man called down to him, over the voice and shuffle and ringing-phone clamor of the floor.

"No, why?"

"We signed him in and brought him up." The detective glanced over his shoulder as the guest in question moved behind him, into view at the end of the hall.

Tall, slender, shy-mannered. Jeans and the green-striped white polo shirt. Styrofoam coffee cup in hand. Merlin.

Arthur reversed himself immediately.

"If you don't want him, that's fine – we've already treated him to death by coffee."

His eyebrows lifted, and Merlin, beginning to saunter toward him, gave him a brilliantly private grin.

"It _won't_ kill you, will it?" he called jokingly, as the other detective correctly assumed he'd take custody of the guest, and disappeared around the corner.

Merlin shook his head, still grinning. "It'd make me sick, though."

Arthur took the Styrofoam cup he offered. "Why did you take it, then?"

"I'm really not good at telling people no thanks." Merlin shrugged. "I got your message, though." There was a lilt of a question at the end of his sentence; Arthur nodded in confirmation.

Not quite willing to leave things lie the way they were – inhuman vigilantes prowling the streets of his city, even if they only hunted rogue members of their own kind – he'd left the verbal invitation with the apartment receptionist for Merlin to drop by the precinct as a follow-up on his citizen's arrest.

"Come on," he said, and Merlin fell into step, heading for the observation room.

"No more _stay out of it, then_?" Merlin said lightly.

Arthur huffed, opening the door and leaning against it to usher his guest inside, then closing it behind them and setting the cup of coffee on a filing cabinet in the corner. "You didn't listen, anyway."

"Yeah… that happens sometimes."

Merlin stepped to the window which framed a view of a yellow-tiled room, metal table and two chairs. The captain's back and the orange-clad Keefe's front. Hands cuffed to a ring bolted on the tabletop, weaselly face animated with excuses and lies; Arthur had turned the sound-mic off long before he'd taken the break to stretch his legs.

"I didn't expect you today, though," Arthur ventured, watching him move without even a hint of discomfort. "Are you all right?"

Merlin didn't turn all the way around to look at him, but it was only a moment of hesitation before he pulled the bottom edge of his shirt up to show a gauze square taped to his side. This he peeled back to show a raw welt, short and wide.

And nearly healed over.

"I told you," he said mildly. "Almost two-hundred percent."

As if Arthur needed proof more than his astounding car-chase reflexes, or that insane bridge-jumping continuation of it on foot. "You want me to say I believe you?"

Merlin studied him a moment longer, then smoothed the bandage back into place, dropping his shirt and raising one shoulder in a careless shrug.

They both turned back to the window.

"We're not getting anywhere," Arthur said, with a brief gesture. "Pathological liar."

Merlin made a noncommittal noise, crossing his arms and leaning casually on the glass. Arthur found himself watching _him_, rather than the silent interrogation. Perfectly calm and self-assured. As he had been facing Arthur's accusation of witnessed murder – and Arthur's gun and cuffs, the night in the storage facility - the gun the jackass Keefe had shot him with, enough to leave the other a quivering wreck with pissed trousers.

"What made you pull Keefe's photo out of that whole boxful of stuff?" he wondered aloud.

"Have you still got it?"

Merlin retreated from the window as Arthur retrieved the box from the corner of the observation room, where they'd been going through it – again – in the hopes of finding more definite links. The report of the attack on Keefe featured front page photo of the wounds, but pages were attached with a smaller shot of his narrow face, and a routine picture-catalogue of the tattoos for identification purposes.

"If you look," Merlin said, angling that page of photos for Arthur's convenience, "you can see scarring, in the pattern of that double-puncture. It's hidden by the tattoos, probably deliberately. I think he did use a meat-fork, like your ME guessed, but I think he chose that weapon to hide the bite marks."

Arthur drew back, staring. Bobby had said, that's why he'd never…

"The bodies were always found at a secondary dump site," Merlin concluded, not noticing Arthur's reaction. "Death from exsanguination. So no one really questioned why there wasn't much blood – on the scene or in the victim."

It made sense. And, it was not a theory that could be shared with anyone who didn't _know_ and _believe_.

An idea sparked, but his attention was drawn to the other room as the captain rose from his chair, leaving the scrawled legal pad and pencil just out of the suspect's reach. The older man paused at the door to issue one last threat or warning, dissatisfaction showing even on his tired face, before he exited.

And came right next door to observation.

The spark nagged Arthur through brief and edited introductions, captain to Merlin and vice versa, til Arthur found himself opening his mouth and making a suggestion that surprised even him.

"Why don't we put Merlin in there with him?"

Merlin's black eyebrows rose, and his blue eyes lit up like a child at Christmas. No, like second-string on the sidelines. Put me in, coach, I can make the play.

The captain shook his head. "Can't," he said shortly, ruefully. "Regulations."

Arthur remembered something else. "Make him a consultant," he suggested. "It's just signing some paperwork, right?" The captain and Merlin wore identical expressions, eyebrows raised in astonishment. "I mean, just for the day, even," he added. "Come on, Captain – I think Merlin seriously intimidates this guy, if we can get a confession…"

The captain sighed. "All right… I have the forms in my desk."

Watching from the hallway, Arthur felt a brief pang of guilt, wondering if the procedure was legal, if Merlin had signed his ridiculously false last name. Then again, this bastard had stabbed Lee, just as the dead murderer had.

He waited at the door of interrogation, leaning on the knob. Merlin paused beside him to clip his temporary credentials to his shirt-pocket, and the captain continued on to the observation room.

"You're okay with this?" Arthur questioned.

"I've never done it before." If Merlin had misgivings, he was hiding them _way_ down.

"Just – use discretion, in what you say," Arthur advised, half-sarcastic.

Humor flickered in Merlin's blue eyes. "Discretion is my middle name."

"It is not," Arthur protested. Either literally or figuratively.

He turned the knob and leaned his way into the room, drawing the attention of the murderer's partner in a sneer – Merlin was still out of sight behind him.

"Morning!" Arthur said cheerfully. "Or afternoon, rather. Finally. Time does pass so slowly in here – are you bored? Thought you might be – I brought a visitor." He stepped out of the way and allowed Merlin into the room, before closing the door behind them both.

"What-the-hell!" Delbert Keefe said, trying to retreat but finding himself still cuffed to the table. "What is this? Why's he in here, he can't be in here!"

"Consultant," Merlin said mildly, tapping the badge. He prowled the perimeter of the room, passing behind the man, and lingering there.

Alert feline, hell. Merlin was like a jungle cat, lurking and shifting, waiting to pounce. Arthur wondered if that feeling transferred through the one-way window to the captain's perception.

"But I shot you!" Keefe protested, twisting to try to keep them both in sight.

Merlin bared his _teeth_ in a feral grin.

Arthur thought they both might have flinched; he hoped he hid his reaction better than Keefe.

"You aren't being cooperative, I'm afraid," Arthur informed him, making a deliberate attempt to return to cheerfulness. "We thought maybe he could convince you to tell us the truth."

"I have been –" Keefe lurched in his chair, trying to keep Merlin in view.

"No, you haven't." Merlin leaned forward and placed a slim pale hand delicately against the side of the man's neck – he jumped again, and Arthur hoped the captain would allow another slip of regulations, and not interrupt them. "You see, your heart-rate increases, just a tick, when you lie. So, I will know when you lie." He let his hand drop and moved around, closer to Arthur. "And I don't appreciate it when people lie to the detective, here."

"I don't either," Arthur agreed. He twisted the second chair around with a deliberate clatter to grate further on Keefe's nerves, then straddled it. Flipping the yellow legal pad to a fresh page, he poised the pencil, ready to write. "So. Let's start from the top, shall we?"

Pasty-pale fear didn't suit the belligerent appearance of the tattoos. Keefe leaned forward to address Arthur, but kept his eyes on Merlin, standing at a few paces distance. "You know what he is?" he hissed. "My friend was one, that's how I know, I can tell…"

"Whatever do you mean?" Arthur said, so casually he drew the man's attention. With his back to the room's camera and the captain at the window – and Merlin himself, actually – he let a flat, humorless, _knowing_ smile spread.

Keefe sat back, glance skittering now between the two of them.

"We're asking you about your secrets," Merlin reminded him. "Not mine… and I must ask you, very nicely, not to speculate on details of my personal life." He stepped closer to the table again, let his fingers trail the edge of it, all tense animal energy. "I expect you saw your partner in action, more than once?"

The ink was stark against the white of Keefe's blanch. "You can't threaten me."

"Who's threatening?" Arthur said innocently. "We're encouraging you to tell the truth without repeating rumors."

"I would truly hate to have to visit you again to discuss any incidents of slander," Merlin added. And his hand hovered once again near the man's neck – innocuously, but Keefe strained back away from it.

"Now, about your partner?" Arthur said.

_**One hour later.**_

"Citizen's arrest, huh?" the captain murmured in Arthur's ear, preparing to follow as a couple of uniforms escorted their confessed-murderer to a more permanently secure location. "That was quite a professional interrogation, between the two of you. Quite a theory that the dominant partner kept Keefe as a sort of pet or surrogate, and Keefe got off on the high of blood loss."

Arthur turned to catch his eye. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking," he said.

"Can we keep Merlin?" The captain smiled wearily. "Why not the police academy, if he's got the instincts and the nerve, and the heart for this kind of work?"

"Health issues," Arthur answered vaguely.

"That condition he mentioned?" The captain nodded, not needing an answer. "Well, it's up to you."

Arthur returned to Merlin deliberately slowly. What he had in mind was preposterous, ludicrous even… and yet, possibly quite clever at the same time.

Merlin was smart and intuitive and patient, sifting through evidence; it wasn't everyone who could do that sort of tedious, hair-pulling investigation together and still be willing to do it again. Physically speaking, he was probably faster and stronger than anyone else on the force – and well-nigh indestructible, too. Arthur wouldn't have to worry that Merlin might be stabbed from behind in a bar. Wouldn't worry about him, come to think of it, in any of the situations of danger Arthur had experienced over the years. In addition, that distinctly predatory aura also served their purpose, once the violence of the arrest was over.

And. He would not be worrying about vampire vigilantes, if he was working with Merlin every day. Ordinary criminals caught – and Arthur would be in the loop on the extraordinary ones. One or two a year, he could handle. He might even be able to help. And he'd feel better about the legality of that whole situation.

"That was surprisingly satisfying," Merlin told him, unclipping his temporary tag from his shirt. "I'm glad to have helped."

"Bit more interesting than apartment-building security?" Arthur commented, accepting the flimsy plastic badge and tapping it in his fingers. Merlin grunted, but grinned, unoffended. "You enjoy that work?"

He shrugged noncommittally – but his blue eyes were keen and watchful and he made no mention of, _Well, it's been fun but I gotta go_.

"I've no idea if the pay's comparable, or if I'm going to eternally tick Bobby off –" he grimaced a little at that word _eternally_, considering – "but the captain's okay with the offer, so if you'd be at all inclined to…" He flapped the temporary credentials significantly. "Give it another go…"

"What do you mean?"

He was pretty sure Merlin already knew what he was getting at, and couldn't read why he was hesitating. Not simply to get Arthur's goat – there was no trace of amusement there.

"Put your stupid fake name on the payroll. Clear you off a corner of my desk. Call you up at all hours when I catch a case."

"Be your partner?" Merlin said, eyebrows lifting.

And, the corners of his mouth in a smile, that was the most genuine Arthur had yet seen on his face. Which seemed almost odd, for what he was. For a split second, it was Arthur's turn to hesitate – did he really know what he was getting into here?

Well, fortune favors the brave.

"Be my partner." He added in a drawl, "As long as either of us can stand the other, anyway."

That grin was brilliant. Intimate, and almost _young_.

Merlin said simply, "Yeah, all right."

…..*….. …..*….. …..*…..

_Closing time…_

_Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end_

_Closing time…_

_Time for you to go out to the places you will be from_

"Closing Time" ~ Semisonic


	6. Found a Friend

**Blood Brothers: Found a Friend**

(chronologically about twelve years after the original "Blood Brothers")

_Closing time…  
Time for you to go out to the places you will be from  
Closing time…  
This room won't be open 'til your brothers or your sisters come.  
So gather up your jackets, and move it to the exits -  
I hope you have found a friend…_

"_Closing Time" _~ Semisonic

…..*….. …..*….. …..*…..

"Is he here yet?" Arty demanded breathlessly, darting through the doorway to the kitchen-dining area. Slipping as he always did on the throw rug, he caught himself on the counter.

Gwen cast a glance over her shoulder to be sure her shamrock wasn't going to tip, nor the African violet, then nudged the oven door up and closed with her foot, setting the pan with eleven-and-a-half pounds of ham on the stovetop.

"No, he's not," she answered. "It's still a bit early, your dad's only just got in the shower. So what makes you think that –"

"Uncle Merlin's faster," Arty protested, and she could hear the roll of his blue eyes – so like his father's – without having to see his round eager face. "At everything."

"Yes, but remember he's bringing –"

"Are they here yet?" piped a second voice, and Gwen tossed another glance-and-smile over her shoulder to her daughter. Two years younger than her brother and ten times calmer, Gwen was proud that little Jenna had remembered their other guest without prompting, in the midst of anticipating Uncle Merlin.

"Not yet," Arty said disconsolately. "What's her name again, anyway?"

"Megan," Gwen answered. She un-tented the foil from the pan, and slit the packet of glazing powder. "But you are to say _Miss_ Megan, you hear? Is your homework done for tomorrow?"

Jenna in first grade this year hardly ever brought work home, but Arty routinely had to finish assignments before he was allowed to play outside on a weekday – and just as routinely, had to be reminded to finish, on a Sunday.

"Yep," he answered easily. Uncle Merlin's visit, and then a promised overnight trip to the Blacks' house, was good incentive. "When are they supposed to come? How much longer?"

"Quarter of an hour maybe, unless they're late," Gwen answered, sprinkling the mix of brown sugar and hickory flavoring over the ham. "Or early, I guess. Set the table for me?"

Plates, napkins, silverware already waited, stacked at Arthur's place at the head of the dining room table. Jenna moved immediately; Arty was slower, but obeyed when Gwen gave him a stern look. She lifted the lid of the pan of scalloped potatoes that bubbled and burped quietly in its cheesy sauce, awaiting a sprinkle of decorative paprika. The microwave droned and the turntable clattered the slow-spinning broccoli-cauliflower mix to steamed perfection.

"Mama, you didn't count right," Jenna said suddenly. "You gave us six plates."

Gwen didn't immediately answer, wrestling the ham carefully back into the oven and switching the function to broil. Then she wiped her hands on the towel and faced her children across the peninsula separating kitchen from dining area.

"Set the place for Uncle Merlin," she said gently. "Dad and I thought it would be the least awkward, that way."

Arty, protesting the moment's extra work, said, "But he always eats at _home_ before he _comes_."

And Jenna, instead of disputing her brother's choice of term, asked quietly, "Does she know?"

_She must_, Arthur had said, when he'd told her, _Merlin is bringing the girl he's been seeing, to dinner. _

To this dinner, especially. And their road-trip, this afternoon, presumably…

She must. Merlin didn't date casually, or at all – not that Arthur was aware of, at least. Gwen doubted her husband had asked, not ever since the fiancée murdered almost a century ago – but knowing Merlin, she also doubted the answer would be anything but _no_.

One of the reasons she was a little nervous about this meal, and the afternoon.

"Yes, I think so," she answered. "But do mind your manners, you don't want to embarrass your Uncle Merlin."

"Yes, we do," Arthur said, appearing in the doorway. His hair was gleaming wetly from his shower, and he'd substituted jeans and moccasins and a long-sleeve polo shirt of an oatmeal shade, for the usual family-only casual sweats and t-shirt. "We want to embarrass Merlin as often and as badly as we –" He caught her hands-on-hips glare as he reached for the fridge handle and automatically amended, "No, of course not! We don't want to – why are we not embarrassing him?"

"Mama's setting a plate for Uncle Merlin at the table," Jenna explained from the other room.

"Ah." Arthur completed his intention, opening the fridge and ducking down for one of the beers on the bottom shelf. As he shut it, he glanced at her and said, more seriously, "He knows better than to bring someone here and expect the secret to be kept. I'm sure she knows."

The children were long over the novelty and excitement of learning why Uncle Merlin never ate when he came for dinner, or had a beer with Daddy watching football. The excitement now was simply because they loved him – and for Arty, the fascination of unusual speed and strength and reflexes. And Merlin, Gwen thought, simply appreciated the affection and friendship of people, even young ones, who wouldn't dwell on or complicate the fact of his… condition.  
"Is she one, too?" Arty said suddenly, and Jenna looked startled at the thought.

"No – but she's got a health condition, too," Arthur answered, uncapping his beer and reaching sideways to gather Gwen against his side one-armed. She snuggled into the side of his neck to inhale that fresh-shower scent on his skin, and he added, "Just mind your manners, huh?"

The doorbell rang, and manners were forgotten.

Jenna shrieked, "They're here!"

And Arty, making a dash – the opposite direction, but the very same way he'd arrived – hollered, "I'll get it!"

Arthur rolled his eyes as he tipped the bottle for another swallow. Gwen turned off the stove and oven before following.

Merlin was through first, wearing a dark blue collared shirt and a throwback vest from a three-piece suit, casually unbuttoned and his sleeves messily rolled. He appeared to be carrying on two separate conversations at once, as the children bubbled over with whatever seemed most important to them to tell him, but his body was angled to hold the door for and guide the petite female that peeked at them from his side.

Sparkling dark eyes in a heart-shaped face. Fashionably-baggy blue-striped t-shirt, the uber-soft material that clung to curves, with white jeans and comfortably worn ballet flats. And a delicately-fringed, artistically-tied turquoise scarf on her head.

Arthur spoke over the children, reaching out his hand. "Welcome. I'm Arthur –"

"Megan," she said, twinkling at him – then past him at Gwen, who found herself immediately smiling back, as she introduced herself also.

"Arty and Jenna, our rugrats," Arthur added.

"Hi," Megan said down into the melee, and handed Arthur a bottle of red wine by the neck – hesitating when she saw his open beer-bottle. "Oh, I thought – Merlin said ham, so I –"

"No, it's great," Arthur said immediately, accepting her gift and turning to pass it to Gwen. "Gwen's not a beer drinker either."

"Come on in," Gwen said, beckoning. "Wade through the children, they've been taught not to bite. Dinner's almost ready."

"Great, I'm starving," Megan said.

Jenna followed her shyly, eyes riveted to the head-scarf – around which no tendril of hair was visible – while Arty had attached himself to one of Merlin's hands. "One game," he was pleading. "One game – please, Dad?"

"Your mom said dinner," Arthur told him.

Arty turned his father's sweet puppy-dog eyes on her, and she relented because of company. "One, while I'm setting the food out."

Merlin's eyes twinkled as he gave her a one-armed hug of greeting – Arty possessed the other, the better to drag on him with. "I'll make it fast," Merlin promised her, as they headed through the living room, toward the hall to the bedrooms instead of the arch to the kitchen-dining room.

"Hey!" Arty protested Merlin's assumption of the outcome of the game.

"Do they ever really grow up?" Megan said to Gwen, her dark eyes fond on Merlin's disappearing back.

One moment's pause – did the girl know just how long Merlin had had, to grow up?

"_I_ haven't seen the proof," Gwen joked.

"Hey!" Arthur said, echoing his son's protest as they moved for the kitchen.

"Smells heavenly in here," Megan complimented, lingering at the end of the peninsula as Gwen went for serving dishes and utensils, and Arthur popped the cork of the wine bottle. "Oh, just a swallow for me – I'm not supposed to, the meds I'm on."

Gwen felt awkward asking – Megan seemed open and friendly, but Gwen didn't know her well enough to be able to avoid giving offense unintentionally. She tried to make her tone light. "What for?"

Because even without Arthur's warning about a _condition_, it was obvious Megan was sick. Not just run-of-the-mill cold or flu. Something serious; in the better light of the dining room Gwen could see she was bone-thin and her skin almost translucent pale.

"Chemo in pill form," Megan answered, and Gwen could have bitten her tongue.

Omigosh. Cancer? She stuttered, "I'm sorry, I –

And Arthur said quietly, "Merlin didn't say."

"I didn't want him to," Megan said, with an easy sweet smile. "I mean, he doesn't introduce himself with his condition either, does he." She shrugged, and smiled down at Jenna, who sidled up to her in evident fascination. "It's not something that defines us."

Gwen said, "Jenna," firmly, to remind her young daughter of her manners, without embarrassing Megan.

"It's all right," the younger woman said, touching Jenna's hair softly. Caramel-colored, ringlets only partially tamed by the ponytail band. "Did you want to ask me a question?"

"What color's your hair? And how come you cover it?"

Gwen held her breath, and the ham for a moment, feeling the heat seep through the pot-holders. Arthur with the carving knife was similarly still.

"Normally my hair is a dull, boring chocolate color," Megan said to Jenna with disarming frankness, and Gwen set the ham down on the counter in front of Arthur. "Nowhere near as gorgeous as yours. But it's struggling right now, so I make believe it's blue-green. What do you think?"

"How can hair struggle?" Jenna asked, as Gwen rounded them to place the dish of steamed vegetables from the microwave, on the table.

"It's sick, too." Megan swallowed the tiniest of sips from her glass – little more than spreading the taste of the wine on her tongue, Gwen suspected, as she went back for the potatoes.

Arty slipped into the far end of the room, wedging himself behind the piano that there wasn't room for in the living room, Nerf gun with its neon-foam bullets held seriously upright-ready.

"Arty, not in –" Arthur began, pausing in carving slices from the ham, the glaze glistening-crisp.

Their son shushed them with wide eyes and a finger to his lips, something Jenna was used to. She handily ignored her brother to ask, "Mama, can I wear a scarf to school?"

"We'll see," Gwen answered. At the far end of the room, a shadow moved, and she paused instinctively, the warmth from the pan in her hands not uncomfortable.

Arty gave a tremendous yell, stepping out from behind the piano and pumping the air full of his little Nerf bullets. And Merlin, his own plastic weapon in hand, glided into the room, his movements too fast and smooth for Gwen's eyes to follow. She thought first he was batting the projectiles away – until he flipped a plastic catch on the gun in his hand.

It popped once – and Arty groaned into the startled silence of the rest of the room. Turning to show them the sucker-tipped bullet, stuck to his forehead.

Then, Gwen saw, Merlin had the rest of Arty's fired bullets, still in his hand.

Jenna giggled. Arthur said, in amused response to his son's disappointment, and Merlin's obvious gleeful triumph, "You didn't give him his own ammo, this time?"

Megan said fondly, "Show-off," and Merlin's grin deepened.

Well, that answered one of the how-much-does-she-know questions.

"Put the toys away, boys," Gwen ordered. "Let's eat."

For a moment all was organized chaos, finding seats, passing food – _yes Arty you _have_ to eat the vegetables._

"Uncle Merlin doesn't eat his vegetables," Arty retorted.

An argument as old as the careful revelation of the secret to their children, when _I ate before I came_ was no longer good enough, when little eyes became more observant, little questions more pointed. As old as the shocking – to her, as his mother – request that Arty be allowed to become one, too. Vampires were cool, and Uncle Merlin was the coolest. Obviously.

But Megan stiffened, potatoes in her hands – glanced startled at Merlin first, who lounged unconcerned before his clean, empty plate, one long arm stretched across the back of her chair – then Arthur, then Gwen.

"Oh," she said, realizing it was a joke.

"That is an old excuse," Arthur said lazily, across the table length-wise from Gwen. "And still holds no water. Eat the vegetables."

"Uncle Merlin gets to do many things you can't," Gwen added as a reminder.

Merlin grinned as Megan glanced at him, new to the discussion and hesitant. "I get to stay up _late_ at night," he said. "Vote, and drive a car, and seek gainful employment."

"Carry a loaded firearm," Arthur put in.

And Merlin finished, "_And_ insult your dad on a daily basis."

"_Un_deservedly," Arthur said contentedly, not disputing the fact of the insults.

Megan was now grinning as wide as the children, tucking a corner of the turquoise scarf behind her shoulder, and Gwen headed the conversation off. "Tell us a little about your family, Megan," she invited.

The rest of dinner was spent in acquainting themselves with Merlin's – well, what was she supposed to think of Megan as? girlfriend? date? – friend. Her family, background, current job – and the girl made it an easy two-way street, asking return questions with a sincere interest based on a good memory of things Merlin had mentioned, and a genuine desire for connection with those held dear by someone she cared for also.

Then the meal was over and Arty was begging the men – but mostly Merlin – to play a game of catch in the backyard.

Merlin hesitated til Megan murmured, not quite inaudibly, "Go on, I'll give Gwen a hand in the kitchen."

So the three males trooped out the slider to the backyard, ball-gloves in hand, Arty slammed the baseball into his with a childishly-serious parody of professionalism. Jenna settled with crayons and a coloring book at the far end of the table – Gwen's place, and so the first cleared – while Gwen and Megan did the cleaning up at a leisurely pace.

"How long have you lived here?" Megan asked, pausing to bend over the piano for a better look at the row of framed photographs parading across the top. Their family only; Merlin was understandably shy about being captured on film, when his appearance never would change normally.

"Arty was a baby when we moved," Gwen said, "so – about eight years, I guess. We didn't want to try to raise kids in a city apartment." She turned her head to look out the window, as Merlin stepped casually into a light throw to Arthur – talking the while, work or women was Gwen's guess – who popped the ball up from his glove to underhand to Arty. Intense concentration – great glee as the small white ball came to a stop in his grasp. "Because of Arthur's official record – and that's partly thanks to Merlin – we had our choice of smaller-town police departments. Arthur talked Merlin into transferring with him –"

"I bet that took some doing," Megan remarked dryly, and Gwen grinned.

"It was good timing," she said. "You'd think that not aging would be one of the perks of his condition – but after a while, people will begin to notice. This way they get to work a lot longer together with Merlin as the junior partner - and with Arthur as the deputy sheriff, a lot of questions can be avoided, later on."

She turned on the faucet and let the dishwasher fall open, pulled out the top rack to begin loading dishes. Megan came to the peninsula with the last of the things from the table – butter dish, salt-and-pepper shakers, pot-holders – then settled onto one of the bar stools.

"How did you meet Arthur?" Megan said curiously.

Gwen smiled down into the sink, beginning to rinse the first plate in the flow of water. "I don't remember," she said. "I was a legal secretary, we worked in the same building. You get familiar with faces, you pick up names… I don't even remember meeting Merlin, honestly, though I was dating Arthur at the time. He was just, Arthur's partner. Around for a while; I recognized him and knew his name, and we'd said _hi, nice weather we're having_, before Arthur thought to actually introduce us."

Plates clattered, water trickled. As Gwen gathered up the silverware, Megan added, more quietly, "And how did you find out about his – condition?"

Gwen had to stop and think. "Arthur mentioned it once or twice in passing, like it was no big thing. I asked, how come he's only a civilian consultant, and he said, health issues. Another time I brought them takeout for lunch, and Merlin apologized all over himself – thanks, but no thanks, you know – saying he had to follow a special strict diet. When Arthur finally told me, what it was… I mean, I knew he wasn't pulling my leg, but it took me a minute to connect that to the whole commercial image – fangs and black capes."

Megan huffed in amusement, leaning back to look out the slider toward the two men and one boy.

"I think it was hardest to accept the non-aging thing," Gwen added. Megan didn't appear to have heard her, so she continued, "How did you meet him?"

The younger woman straightened, reaching to toy with the fringe on one loose end of her head-scarf. "It was a few years ago, actually. At the college, I was doing a pre-vet degree."

Gwen nodded; that fit with Megan's current job at one of the closer-to-the-city pet clinics.

"He helps Bobby with that non-profit blood bank business, right?" Megan continued, checking to see that her assumption of Gwen's knowledge was correct. "He had one of their vans on-campus that day, and I'd just found out my afternoon bio-lab was canceled, so I thought, why not? Do my good deed for the day."

Without knowing where the narrative was going, Gwen commented, "He said once they give eighty percent of what they collect to the hospitals – that's better than some charities."

Megan dimpled, and continued her story. "No one else was there, it was just him and me. I'm filling out paperwork and wondering why he can't stop staring – and he's really cute but obviously not a student, and I'm wondering how to tell him to knock it off without being rude, and… He wouldn't do it, wouldn't take the paperwork or prep the kit. Even though everything was in order. He asked some questions – kind of strange, kind of personal – and then told me, my white count was off and I needed to see my doctor. I said, you can tell that by looking at my face?"

Gwen pushed down the lever that cut off the flow of water in the kitchen sink. Dried her hands wordlessly.

"So he was the one who diagnosed me, pretty much," Megan said, smiling again – and Gwen could see only good humor in her dark eyes.

"That's how you found out –"

"Leukemia," she answered. "There's a specification, but –" She shrugged. "Basically leukemia."

Gwen wanted suddenly to ask bout the prognosis – but that was awkward even when it was a good friend. How did you say, _How long have you got?_ inoffensively? It couldn't be done.

"I started treatment, dropped out of school so I could get a job with an actual health plan," Megan went on. "And about eight months ago, I saw one of Bobby's vans again – and just on the off chance, I checked, and Merlin was there. I spent a couple of hours, hanging out and chatting – weird place for it, I know – and there was a handful of people who went through there, donating, too. I was impressed how professional he was, fast and gentle and funny, and wondered if he was a doctor."

Gwen wondered, if it would be very disconcerting to watch Merlin handle the procedure of blood donation – needles and bags – if one knew about him. Listen to him tell them, _thank you_. Weird.

"I had another boyfriend when we met," Megan said, a bit abruptly, as if she'd decided to share a more personal confidence, in spite of their short acquaintance. "We broke up after my diagnosis. And… since then, since _this_ –" she flipped the end of the scarf, then clasped her hands on the counter, between the potted shamrock and the African violet – "no other guy has so much as flirted with me. I guess I don't blame them actually, but… I'm still a woman, still a person with feelings, you know?"

_Loneliness_, Gwen thought, as she nodded and hummed agreement. And wasn't Merlin in a unique position to understand that.

"But Merlin. Was so very sweet – _is_ always. So very sweet. Calling me at work, taking me for coffee – even though he doesn't drink any, obviously – a couple of movies. Even _flowers_, and Gwen – it's not at all like it's because he feels sorry for me." Megan's dark eyes were intense, and held Gwen's without self-consciousness. "It's not at all like, we're only together because neither of us can get anyone else, because of our respective conditions. It's… like his past and my future don't matter, today is today and there can be joy and pleasure, and it can be worthwhile. You know?"

"I'm really glad," Gwen said sincerely. "For both of you."

"A bit surprised, though?" Megan said, and Gwen looked at her, feeling just that emotion. The girl was intelligent – brave to say that out loud to a stranger – and still, not the least bit offended, if it was true. "Because that boy really _really_ doesn't date."

Gwen smiled too, and echoed softly, "Boy," because Megan would know what she meant, what a funny word to apply to this particular male, no matter the perception of his age. "How did you find out, then?"

"He told me."

Gwen followed the girl's gaze out the slider, to see Merlin twist and leap – long lean form, incongruous semi-dress clothes – and catch an uncatchable ball. Then turn his brilliant smile on the other two – Arthur scoffing and Arty crowing.

"It was just after they told me…" Megan hesitated, and glanced over her shoulder at Jenna, kneeling on a chair and humming over her color-book. "They can't _cure_ me. The chemo, the meds, they only… give me longer. And he… told me." Her gentle snort sounded ironic. "His is a life sentence, too."

Gwen ventured to put her hand on Megan's – thin, pale hand, with a small bruise on the back – before the slider opened and Arthur stepped in, leading the others.

"The Blacks will probably be here in a quarter of an hour," he said, tossing the baseball casually. He glanced at Jenna – at the two of them at the counter – and added, "The kids have their stuff packed?"  
Jenna hadn't wanted to decide, earlier when Gwen was trying to put her daughter's overnight bag together, so that still needed to be done. "Put away your crayons, baby. Arty, what did you pack?"

"My Hardy Boys books," her son answered, trying to take Merlin's ball-glove from him – Merlin was holding it easily out of reach, as Arty clung double-fisted, and the boy's entire weight dangled from one of Merlin's slender wrists. "And socks."

"Priorities," Megan quipped.

"Pjs?" Gwen suggested. "Toothbrush, underwear, clean shirt."

Merlin let Arty down, relinquishing the glove, and Gwen directed him toward the far end of the dining room with her hand on the nape of his neck, ignoring the, "Aw, mom!"

"Come, Jenna," she added, passing the table.

Her daughter folded half her crayons inside the book, scooping the whole bundle against her body in an awkward crouching walk. Down the hallway, to Jenna's pink-and-purple room, where Gwen sat on the bed next to the flowered overnight bag.

"You really do need to decide, what you want to wear for bed tonight, what you want to wear tomorrow." Jenna dropped her armload on the dresser top, and knelt by her open drawer to continue the rifling perusal Gwen had given up on in favor of cooking the company meal. "Pick one," she advised her daughter. "Close your eyes and point. Or I will."

Over Jenna's hemming and hawing, Gwen was surprised to hear the piano, as someone began to play. She couldn't make out the melody, it was something slow and simple, but it continued without hesitation or mistake, that she could make out from here.

"Someone's playing piano," Jenna observed, settling on a red t-shirt with purple flowers.

"Maybe Miss Megan knows how to play," Gwen proposed, curious. "Okay, put that one in here. You want the Minnie pjs, or the froggie ones?"

Standing and going to the doorway as Jenna finished deciding, and packed her clothes as haphazardly as any well-meaning six-year-old, Gwen listened.

The tune was whimsical. Chords in the higher-pitched right hand, a cascade of single notes in the lower left. Repetitious, but with minor changes that formed overall movement and she _knew_ she knew it, but…

"Get your toothbrush from the bathroom," she reminded Jenna. "And find your pinkie elephant if you want it to sleep with tonight."

"Yes, mama."

As Gwen stepped down the hall, slow and quiet so she wouldn't disturb or interrupt the player, she saw Arthur first. Seated on the bar stool that Megan had vacated, he leaned sideways on the counter of the kitchen peninsula, his jaw propped on his hand in such a way that his fingers covered his mouth. It was harder to read his expression that way, but – he was focused on the piano in the corner she couldn't see yet, so completely she thought he hadn't noticed her at all.

Putting her shoulder to the hallway wall, she slid around the corner to see Merlin and Megan at the piano. The young woman perched on about a third of the bench, facing the room with a dreamy look in her eyes, leaning on Merlin's shoulder and swaying with him.

As he played.

Those long fingers, so perfect and sure on the keys of her piano, Gwen was surprised she'd never even considered this possibility before. How many years had she known him? Had he been inside her and Arthur's home, that they'd had Gwen's mother's instrument, and she'd never had the slightest inkling he could play. Much less so beautifully – almost she might have said professionally, but he put heart and soul into the piece she was _sure_ could never be written in the notation – and from memory.

"This is from that old movie," Megan remarked. "The Redford-Newman one."

Not _Butch Cassidy_, the other one. The con movie. Arthur said, a bit huskily, "The Sting."

Merlin murmured confirmation, kept playing.

Megan said, "What's it called? I know they used _The Entertainer_ for that movie, and a couple other rags, but this one's not really proper jazz."

"It's, _Solace_."

Gwen felt tears welling in her eyes.

And was almost glad when the doorbell rang, so she could duck through the living room and whisk them away unseen by the others.

The Blacks were gorgeous people. He was a gentle giant, she a long-haired witch – so to speak – with a heart of gold and a delightful cackling laugh. She volunteered in the library at the school, and the kids loved her; the Blacks had none, and were pleased to babysit. Coming from church as the Blacks did, they'd offered to pick the kids up, since they were headed out the opposite direction.

Ten minutes and at least twice as many admonitions, reminders, and assurances later, Gwen and Megan were tucked in the backseat of the new Buick, behind Arthur in the driver's and Merlin his shotgun. Three roses rode carefully on the backseat between them, pink, white, and red. And even through the 60's classics playing background to the drive, Gwen could still hear the notes of Merlin playing her piano.

She wanted to ask, but it wasn't her place. Arthur didn't, neither did Megan – whether that was something the other girl already knew, or just took in their still-getting-acquainted stride. Although, Merlin was the sort of personality to pick up these little talents along what was for him a very long way, and simply say nothing about them.

A pleasant drive, on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, cloudy and cool, if one could forget their destination. Gwen watched her husband from behind – the set of his shoulders, the tension in his neck, his focus keeping his head facing forward – and knew he felt awkward, also.

She wondered if Merlin felt it. If maybe his _Solace_ was to calm nerves. If one still felt nervous about much, after nearly a century of experience.

Usually Bobby went, she understood from Arthur. And knowing her husband like she did, she understood how both of them had been content to leave that tradition, even as – she suspected – they achieved a closer relationship than Merlin had with Bobby.

But Bobby was a newlywed this year. A secretary or something, one of their own.

Gwen guessed, from the little either had said, that Merlin was happy for his oldest friend, and had an amiable enough relationship with his bride. But… things had changed. As they always did. It was one reason she was always sensitive to Merlin and Arthur's friendship.

After four months' notice and planning, she was still surprised, honestly, that she'd been included in the new arrangement. But it was probably for the best, with Megan along as well. The younger woman hummed to the soft music, watching out the side window, as comfortable with the lack of conversation as the rest of them were.

Fifty minutes later, they were off the highway, gliding along country roads. Rolling green hills, quaint centralized towns, outskirts of a city she was unfamiliar with.

"Here on the right," Merlin told Arthur, pointing. "Take the second entrance, though."

Arthur made the turn, slowed the car to a crawl on the gravelly lane.

And now Gwen's attention was focused outside the window, too. Ancient droopy cypress, uneven rows of unmatched stones. Gray, black, dark red, moss-covered white. Marble and granite, some mildly weathered, some actually too crumbly to read from a passing vehicle. Some seemingly solitary, some obviously family plots. Low squares, taller obelisks.

"And left here," Merlin added. He seemed the calmest of them all; their sympathy to his pain was maybe more acute than the feeling itself, anymore. "You can park anywhere here, really."

Arthur guided the car closer to the curb-less verge. Braked… shifted to park… turned the engine off.

Gwen pulled her gaze from searching the names to find the one Merlin had come to visit – to see that Arthur was still doing the same. Merlin shifted in the passenger seat to look back at Megan and then Gwen in the backseat, with a gentle smile, then met Arthur's eyes as he turned his attention back to his friend.

"It's all right," Merlin told them, and reached for the door handle.

That was the release they needed as well. Merlin didn't wait for them, exactly, but they followed more hesitantly, as he made a clearly familiar way between headstones, touching a couple of them as he passed. In choosing different ways around the other rows and stones and graves, Megan drifted a few yards to the right, and Gwen came to a stop before Arthur did, a row behind Merlin and several feet on his left, beneath one of the spreading cypresses.

It was very quiet. The wind spoke faintly, and no sound of human traffic intruded; Gwen inhaled the spicy scent of the tattered bark and needles and felt the peace of the place as the three of them, separate from each other and from their friend, waited in silence.

She heard neither words nor tears; Merlin simply stood before an extraordinary marker, the long stem of the single red rose held between fingertips of both hands, in front of him.

It was the statue of a young girl, with a flowing garment and stone hair curling gently to her shoulders. Wings obvious, but tucked away behind her back, head bowed in an attitude of more of shelter than grief, and Gwen would have said there was a smile. Name and dates indistinguishable on the base below the statue's enveloping hem.

_Lori_ – Gwen didn't know a last name, or an age.

After a moment, Arthur stepped forward to his side. Gwen didn't think either of them said anything, but Arthur's hand on Merlin's shoulder seemed comfortable and natural for both of them. It wasn't condolences needed, after all this time, just… companionship. And understanding.

And when Arthur finally dropped his hand and moved away, turning back to join her beneath the cypress tree, she leaned against his side and took his hand. Taking a moment to realize, as so often was taken for granted in the bustle of daily life, how lucky she was that he was _here_, and that he loved her.

What love Merlin must have borne his lady, that it brought him back year after endless year.

Fiancée, Gwen knew, and her tragic death had prevented their marriage and a long happy life together – she thought also that Merlin's condition was tied into the incident somehow, but the details were unnecessary for her to know. She thought – she hoped – it was love alone that brought him, not regret or guilt.

"Bobby showed me her picture once," Arthur said to her, in a tone so soft it might not have carried to Merlin. He didn't give any sign that he'd noticed, standing gazing down at the words on the marker, though with very little tension in his body. "She was pretty – lively, even in that old black-and-white photo."

"If I outlive you," she whispered up to Arthur's profile, "I hope it will not be by long." Because she never would contemplate a tragedy of her own, in spite of Arthur's profession. Always she would assume, old age.

Moments passed in silence.

Megan moved forward then, stepping slowly, and bent to lay her pink rose at the statue's base. As she straightened, Merlin's hand found hers. Gwen could hear them speaking – to each other or to the spirit of the girl Lori, she couldn't tell.

"He offered," Arthur said slowly, "Megan. The choice. Did she tell you?"

"What choice?" Gwen said.

"It was why he told her. About his condition. Because they don't expect her to… have many years, anymore. No cure, so… he told her." Gwen looked wonderingly up into Arthur's eyes, deep blue in the double shade of cloud and tree. Arthur could see that she didn't really understand. "He offered her his blood. To become one of them. Trade one condition for the other, but live. He told her, because it could save her."

Gwen looked back at them in something not unlike shock – the petite girl with the turquoise scarf wrapping her head, the tall slim… well, vampire, though she hardly ever thought of him with that term.

Because she knew how he felt about it. How far from his own choice it had been, whatever the circumstances. It was one of the reasons she hadn't even hesitated to ask her husband's partner and best friend, day two in the hospital, if he'd like to hold their newborn son. One of the reasons he always had been their first-choice babysitter – because her children simply could not be safer with anyone else. It was the reason that Arty's expressed desire to contract Uncle Merlin's condition was a joke, rather than a worry. Because Merlin was always so careful, so adamant that he would not be the cause of someone else's change.

"She declined," Arthur said, his eyes inscrutable, past her on the two.

"She –" Gwen swallowed her gasp, because of where they were, and because Merlin's hearing was so keen.

Would she, for Arthur? Yes. But that wasn't the question. He'd never even considered asking anyone else to marry him – the delay, the nerves, the discomfort of his proposal to her that she'd tease him about for the rest of their lives, assured her of that, even if she'd been disinclined to take his word for it. And, they had children already.

"I guess she prefers to play the hand she's been dealt," Arthur said.

_I love you, but… not enough for that? _Or the suspicion that pity moved the offer more than love? A twin of the fear that Gwen had to deny – that something would happen to Merlin, leaving Megan alone for _so_ much longer?

But it wasn't just, trading the enjoyment of food or drink, for a cure. It was the assumption of a secret, kept from friends and family for their own safety – just let government-types get a hold of those sort of details, super-human strength and healing capabilities and longevity… that would be a royal mess. It was the loss of a normal life – career and retirements and golden years. It was outliving loved ones, or having to leave them before they could discover the truth. Holding acquaintances at arms'-length. And starting over again… and again… and again. And perhaps, if Megan accepted initially, then came to regret the decision, Merlin would blame himself for her unhappiness…

"I don't think I blame her," Gwen said softly.

The two stood silent now, leaning against each other, fingers of their hands still entwined. Evidently neither revelation nor refusal had come between them, after all. After a moment, Megan released Merlin's hand to step away in a slow wander.

Arthur nudged Gwen, and she knew what he was saying, without need for words. She glanced up at him, _are you sure?_ And he nodded.

So Gwen moved forward, careful of the other gravesites, til she stood at Merlin's side. He'd crossed his arms in a way that protected the rose still in one hand, and closed his eyes, but there was a faint smile on his face.

"Sometimes when I stand here, and it's quiet and the wind is blowing, I can remember her singing." He inhaled deeply, let his breath out slowly. "It's been so long, though."

Gwen said nothing. _I'm sorry_ was pathetically inadequate; she only laid her hand on his arm, upwards of his elbow. For balance, as she laid the large-blooming white rose across Megan's pink one, on the grass.

"I'm _so_ glad Arthur has you," Merlin continued as she straightened. Without opening his eyes, but he turned his head slightly to her and his smile widened a degree or two. "I think he knows how lucky he is. And I'm lucky that you've adopted me."

And there was the deep and earnest blue of his eyes. And it hurt, that she wanted him to have what he wanted, what she had with Arthur and Merlin never grudged one instant, rather rejoiced for them. But she couldn't give it to him. And neither, it seemed, could Megan. No one but Lori, maybe.

"If she loved you," Gwen said softly – not questioning, only establishing a condition – "she would be happy that you found happiness."

"And meaning." Merlin nodded. "I know. I just… I miss her, and coming back… reminds me _why_, I do what I do. And wait."

Gwen shivered. Knowing it would not be old age, for him. Knowing Merlin was not the sort to put silver to his own bloodstream. That it would have to be, a rare accident or an act of deliberate violence. Maybe _far_ into the future…

"I'm not in any rush for it to be over," Merlin reassured her with a funny grin. "_Someone_ has to watch Arthur's back. But Lori was always patient with me."

Gwen wondered what Merlin had been like when he was actually a young man. She wondered what Lori had been like. What living in so many different eras had been like… But she didn't and wouldn't ask those kinds of questions. She wouldn't for the world cause him inadvertent pain, to satisfy her own curiosity.

He sighed then, bending to place his red rose carefully atop the other two. Then he kissed his fingertips and touched them to the statue's smooth marble forehead. "See you next year," he said. "If not before."

Turning toward the car with her, he slung an arm over her shoulder in a brotherly way. Arthur pushed away from the tree trunk, seeing that they were headed back; he'd be at the car before them, but Megan was several dozen yards to their left.

Gwen wondered what the younger woman was thinking, whether her thoughts were resentful or resigned, at peace or in turmoil, to be here. She wondered if Merlin had asked Megan to come as a way of somehow introducing her to Lori or vice versa, or whether as a gentle persuasion to reconsider his offer. Not her business, though.

"I'm so terribly sorry for what happened to her, and to you," Gwen told Merlin as they crossed the lawn in an uneven line out of respect for the other graves, in spite of her opinion of the words themselves. "But I'm also, so glad we got to meet you, to know you, to have you."

Not just because of his indestructible qualities, she knew he understood. For his unique personality, and one-in-a-million character.

He pulled her closer to kiss her hair. "Me, too."

On the way home, Merlin slid into the backseat with Megan, so Gwen took shotgun. Once they gained the highway, she glanced back to see the two practically shared the middle of the bench seat, sides touching from shoulder to knee. Megan had her head on Merlin's shoulder and her eyes closed, her arm twined around his and his hand between both of hers. She looked exhausted and might even have been sleeping. Merlin rested his cheek on the turquoise head-scarf, his head turned to gaze out her side-window.

Without moving a muscle, Merlin's eyes met Gwen's – and he smiled, in that special way he had of making her feel like, in that moment, she was his best and only friend. She'd seen him smile at Arthur the same way, and Megan too – establishing immediate and intimate connection with brave and open vulnerability.

Gwen smiled back.

Yes, he would have befriended Megan for loneliness and for pity's sake, not considering the relational benefits to himself. But he would also have the courage to leave pity behind for the better, though more painful, feelings of genuine friendship and even love.

Then Arthur's phone warbled an incoming call, from where he kept it in one of the center-console cup-holders. She gave him a disapproving glance as he reached to answer it, as she always did, knowing he wouldn't ever _not_ answer it, because of his job.

"Oh, hey, Johnson. What's up?"

The sheriff, on a Sunday. Gwen saw Arthur straighten at the wheel, muscles gaining a degree of alertness in their tension, perhaps to compensate for the way his vision went a bit vague, seeing not only the road before them, but visualizing whatever the sheriff described.

"I see. And that was – okay. Did they – uh huh. You want us to – no, Merlin's with me, actually, we can be there in –" He glanced at the digital clock on the dash.

From the backseat, Merlin said quietly, "Forty-five minutes."

And Arthur repeated it without hesitation. "And the ME can be there by then, right? Okay, I'll check in once we're there." He disconnected the call.

"Do I even want to ask?" Gwen sighed. Of course it was bad news, and of course that meant, extra hours.

"Sorry, babe," Arthur said automatically. "Rain check on our quiet evening without kids?"

She shrugged and smiled, reminding herself, supportive, not nagging. He was not the only one to make sacrifices for his job; it was the way she served the people, if a very small one. Make it easy for Arthur to serve.

"It is what it is," Megan said from the backseat, sounding a bit groggy; she probably _had_ been asleep.

"Gwen, do you think you can give Megan a ride home?" Merlin said.

"Of course."

Pulling up to the curb outside their house twenty minutes later, Gwen returned Arthur's quick kiss and even quicker, "Bye," but didn't immediately move from the passenger seat. Megan scooted forward and they both watched the two men stride forward to Merlin's shiny gray pick-up. Merlin fished in his pocket for his keys and headed for the driver's seat; she'd heard Arthur's stories of his driving, but had never yet experienced his 'emergency mode'.

"It's kind of scary, isn't it, what they do," Megan said quietly, as the truck doors slammed nearly simultaneously and the brake lights flared in readiness.

Gwen hummed agreement. "This is the part that's hardest for them, though," she said. "Opening a new case. Learning of a new crime." Studying the scene, getting to know the victim. "It's the end of the case that's scary for the wives and girlfriends."

The truck turned the corner, and Gwen glanced back as Megan's dark eyes widened in realization.

"You're welcome to stay, of course," Gwen said gently – now thinking, if Merlin's current choice of profession had anything to do with Megan's choice, or not. "But if you're tired, I can just –"

"Yes, please, if it doesn't make me seem ungrateful." Megan smiled in self-conscious relief, and they switched positions in the car – Gwen to the driver's seat, Megan to the front passenger.

"Honestly, it makes me feel a little guilty sometimes, around other wives," Gwen said, shifting the still-running engine to pull forward. "Because I know, Arthur's much safer than anyone with a – more _normal_ partner."

"Have either of them ever been injured?" Megan asked.

Gwen didn't bother correcting the term to _wounded_. "Merlin's been shot a couple times –" to Megan's alarm she added – "the idiot won't even consider going to the hospital, of course. Arthur mainly banged up as Merlin shoves him out of the way. But I think he enjoys complaining about that."

Megan smiled. "I supposed it takes some getting used to."

Gwen agreed. Another few minutes passed in silence, before she ventured, "What are your plans, then, or do you have any?"

"With Merlin, you mean?" Megan shifted in the seat, but not uncomfortably. "Well, when they told me, terminal, I decided then and there, marriage was not for me. To anyone. This was before I re-connected with Merlin… I think he would ask me, if that was something I wanted. Bucket list – the big wedding and white dress and all. Even if it complicated things for him, legally. But… no offense, but it seems to me, marriage kind of ends the sense that you're with each other by choice, you know? And for me… things will probably get worse. And even though I believe he'll stick with me, I don't want either of us to feel it's because he _has_ to."

Gwen found she understood. Even though marriage seemed to her like a greater, deeper choice than simply not-breaking-up, Megan and Merlin's situation was different.

"Can you promise me something, though?" Megan said.

"Yeah, sure, what is it?" Gwen glanced aside at her, away from the road, when she didn't answer right away.

"I'm sure you'd do it anyway, you and Arthur both – it's kind of incredible, how close of friends those two are, isn't it? – but could you just… be there for Merlin. When I'm not anymore. I think…" she hesitated. "I'm afraid he'll take it hard."

Gwen sighed, and freed a hand from the steering wheel, to reach for Megan's. She thought the same thing. "I promise."

"That's all right, then." Megan squeezed Gwen's hand and faced forward. "Although – it seems a bit wrong to think, I'll probably see his Lori, before he does."

Gwen had to blink fast, and force a brave smile. "I'm sure that thought will comfort him. And you can be sure to tell her how he's doing, too."

"I still have all four of my grandparents," Megan said contemplatively. "I might end up waiting for them to join me, also, but not for long…"

The rest of the ride passed in silence, but for Megan's directions to her apartment – not far from Merlin's place in Bobby's building, actually.

"This is it," Megan said as Gwen shifted into park. She gathered her handbag, and turned to face Gwen in the seat. "I was so glad to have met you – and Arthur. You have a beautiful family."

"Thank you – I was glad to meet you, too." On impulse, Gwen leaned over to gather the younger woman in a close hug, which they both held for several long moments before letting go.

Megan's dark eyes twinkled as she opened the door and twisted her legs to get out. "Bye, Gwen."

Gwen smiled. "Goodbye, Megan."

**A/N: It's long for a single chapter, but it's fluff compared to the other ones, so… **

**FYI, a single red rose means "I love you." Pink's meaning can include appreciation, grace, gentleness, admiration, sympathy, sweetness. White is purity, innocence, youthful, heavenly. **


	7. Take Me Home 1

(Chronologically about 50 years after "Found a Friend")

**Blood Brothers: Take Me Home**

_I know who I want to take me home  
I know who I want to take me home  
I know who I want to take me home  
Take me home…_

"Closing Time" ~ Semisonic

…..*….. …..*….. …..*…..

Merlin visited Gwen on Tuesdays.

She was in the same home she had been for nearly five years, just… moved to a single, now. He never went to her room anymore, not like he had to the double.

It was a quiet place, serene, the great communal lounge with it's always-active and aromatic coffee bar in the corner, the rows of bookcases whose shelves held also videos, puzzles, games. Round tables and chairs, widescreen tv and connected systems, overstuffed couches.

Piano under the window, kept reasonably tuned.

Merlin slouched over the keys, letting his fingers wander, keeping one eye on Gwen. She was in the window seat, paging absently through a photo album – it reminded him of Bobby's, though he hadn't seen that one in years – brushing away a persistent frond from one of the ferns suspended from the alcove ceiling.

If he closed his eyes, he could hear Lori's voice crooning the lyrics to the song his hands and fingers played, almost all on their own. It was one of the reasons he rarely played, except on Tuesdays for Gwen. And this one, he had actually heard Lori sing, more than once at Bobby's place. Way back when.

_ What'll I do… with a just a photograph… to tell my troubles to?_

_ What'll I do… when I'm alone, with only dreams of you… that won't come true… what'll I do…_

"I know I know this one," Gwen commented, lifting her head but gazing somewhat vacantly past him. He opened his mouth to tell her – something, maybe not the actual title and lyrics, in case it was more hurtful than soothing to her today, but she sighed and shook her head. "Doesn't matter. See this one?" She held up the book to show him the next photo. "Arty's first year in Little League. Remember?"

"I do," Merlin said, finding a smile easy.

"He takes his boys to Little League now." Gwen turned the book around, cocking her head at the picture as if she couldn't quite believe that her little boy was a father himself.

Merlin refrained – as he always did – from bothering her with corrections. Arty's two little boys were all grown up – one into the Navy, where Merlin could not follow, and one into patent law, where he wasn't needed.

"Jenna at the junior prom." Gwen flipped a plastic-protected page. "Arthur at his retirement party." She tipped the book and squinted. "I think whoever took this one got you in it."

"Let me see." He twisted on the piano bench, held out his hand for the book.

"Here beside Arthur. You're turning away, but I'm pretty sure this is your arm and the back of your head."

Merlin snorted at the unflattering – though nearly unrecognizable - slice of himself at the edge of the photo.

Arthur large as life, dead center. Raising a cup of punch in toast, cocky grin marred not in the slightest by the wrinkles at his eyes and the slight sag to his jowls. The twenty extra pounds distributed evenly about his torso as simple extra padding for the firm muscles beneath. He'd deserved every minute of that party; he'd earned his peaceful retirement, and so much more. Arthur's retirement, when Arty had inherited Merlin as a partner.

Arthur had suggested it years earlier, when Arty had graduated the academy, joined the force. Donned the uniform, hit the streets. Merlin had been agreeable to the change, if it was what father and son both wanted. Arty had refused, then. For many reasons.

Because he wanted his father to have the added protection on the job, Merlin's condition would provide… because he knew their bond was uncommon, and they'd both be happier to remain in partnership… because he knew Merlin would worry about Arthur if he wasn't at his side. And personal reasons more complex, that Merlin knew he only partially understood. Having his 'uncle' as partner would be little better than having his father, which no young man wants. For many reasons.

Miserably ironic – or maybe conclusively perfect – that Arthur's heart had failed during a routine hip-replacement surgery two years ago. But eighty-seven years was a damn good life.

"I remember him teasing me about coming to work here, after Arty left active duty for his desk job at the precinct," Merlin said softly, allowing himself to feel the deep and melancholy ache of missing the best friend he'd ever had. "You remember that stupid joke he always made about me protecting his back-side – just in a different way?"

"He never meant it," Gwen said. "He knew you had to be out there doing, not in here taking care of us old folks." She shook her cascade of gray curls at him. "He wouldn't have wanted you fetching and carrying and cleaning here, really – you two would have spent the whole day bickering and arguing."

"We did that anyway, some days," Merlin reminded her with a grin.

Gwen hummed agreement. "And some days he wished he could still suit up and go out there with you…" She sighed, and her eyes went a little vague. And a moment later, she pushed stiffly to her feet and shuffled her slippers across the rug to him, gripping his shoulder for comfort and support, both, as she passed. "When is he coming home, Merlin?" she asked, with innocent puzzlement. "When is he coming home?"

_Not ever again_. Or, _He already is_…

Merlin took a deep breath and let it out by gradual degrees as she made her slow way across the carpet, out the door. He listened and could hear her soft sliding steps all the way down the hall to her room. The single. Maybe she hadn't been in the other room, the room with Arthur, long enough to remember. Long enough for it to feel like home, but… she never made the mistake of going back there. Always she went to the single.

He stared across the common room, warm air and dancing dust motes, hearing the front door chime, the voice of a visitor inquiring at the front desk. He put his left forefinger down on high A, drawing it slowly and unevenly down the keys – low, lower…

Footsteps approached, stopped at the doorway behind him.

"You used to be better at that," a voice said. Mature male voice.

A strange sad thrill ran up Merlin's spine, and he tucked his hand away in his lap. So like Arthur's voice… and yet not.

"I'm a bit out of practice, maybe." He put a smile on his face for the other man's sake, and turned. "Hey, Arty."

He looked, so like Arthur had. The same eyes, the same smile, the same laugh, always, though his hair had been a bit darker and tightly curled where his father's had been straight. That hair now mostly white, and while Arthur's extra weight put on as he'd aged, had made him barrel-chested, Arty was more rotund in his fifties-nearly-sixties.

"It's been a while," Arty said, moving forward. Merlin watched him cross the carpet, lower himself to a seat in the window, just where his mother had been.

"Yeah," Merlin agreed, and cleared his throat. "I am sorry about that, honestly, it's been –"

"Don't apologize," Arty said, holding up one hand. "I know it can't be easy, I know I must remind you of my father. Hell, half the time Mom thinks I'm him. And I let her. It makes her happy." He was gazing almost absently-mindedly down the room toward the hall to Gwen's room.

"How's your wife?" Merlin said. "And the boys?"

"Ah, she can't wait for me to retire for good," Arty said. "She wants to move back down south. Closer to her family. The boys are good. No complaints. We're anticipating news of engagements, actually, they've both found girls they're fairly serious about."

"Good for them. And Jenna?"

Arty grinned and chuckled. "She and Robert are on a two-week holiday in Hawaii for their thirtieth anniversary, courtesy of their twins."

Merlin smiled, happy to hear it. "Nice work if you can get it," he said.

Arty hummed an agreement that was still a bit distracted. "How was she today?" he asked.

"Good. Looking at photos."

"Did she tell you the doctors are worried about her heart?" Arty said. "She's on medication, now."

"I could tell," Merlin said. "But I didn't say anything to her, and she didn't mention it."

Gwen's mind had been weakening for several months, now it seemed her heart was doing the same. They sat a moment in silence, and neither of them said, _she's not long for this world_. Merlin had decided a long time ago that feeling sorry for himself was a bottomless pit he'd just as soon keep out of; instead he was glad to think of her with Arthur again.

"We know you come on Tuesdays," Arty remarked. "The rest of us kind of – keep out of your way. Let you have your space."

Merlin nodded, knowledge and understanding, both. Having Arthur's family know was one thing – letting additional members in on the secret, over the decades, something else. And so he'd drifted… after Arthur's funeral, quite far. He wondered, when Gwen passed and Arty retired and moved…

"Bobby once said to me, you find something else to live for, and then something else, and then something else," he said down at his hands.

"Bobby." Arty grunted. "Haven't seen him in _years_. He's got you doing jobs these past two?"

Merlin felt his mouth quirk, but he didn't look up. "No, Bobby's wife decided Europe was for her, last fall. I've just been – wandering a bit more. Arty, what is it? You know I come here Tuesdays and you've been sitting making small-talk with me instead of going to your mother's room."

Arty gave him a rueful look. "Sometimes I forget how very long you've been a detective." He sat back in the window seat, sighing. Merlin only waited. "How long has it been," his former partner and his best friend's son said, "since you had to track one of _yours_?"

Merlin straightened on the piano bench. "In the city, not since the year after you were first elected sheriff. Throughout the state… I found one, last year. Why?"

"I have a case," Arty confessed. "I'm probably going to be taking the lead on it myself – the boys will wonder, but I don't have to explain myself. And I think it would be a good idea if you could ride along on this one."

"What's happened?" Merlin asked. He'd honestly thought that sort of unusual criminal activity was dying off.

Arty didn't answer, instead pushed himself groaning to his feet; Merlin stood too, expectant. "Not here. What's your paperwork like these days?"

"Um. I think I'm meant to be the grandson of Arthur's original partner," Merlin said, wondering now whether his driver's license was current. "I think the birth date has me at… thirty-nine or forty."

Arty gave him a sardonically-raised eyebrow, and he shrugged, unrepentant. Then added without thinking, "You're on your way home?"

"Yeah, why? You want to come over for dinner? We'll tell Tracy that grandson story, and –"

"And I ate before I came?" Merlin suggested, not quite able to stop the grin that matched Arty's. "No, I just thought, if you were heading in now, I'd catch a ride with you."

A moment passed, and Merlin remembered, this former partner was just as astute in his own way as his father had been. He might as well have said, _I walked here because I have nothing better to do, and I want to start on the case right away for the same reason_.

"I've got a good bit of it on my ESD in my car," Arty said. "You can borrow it tonight, bring it down to the office in the morning?"

"Yeah, sure." Merlin followed Arty from the senior-care center, waiting til they cleared the front doors to ask, "What's the gist of what I'm looking at?"

"Started as a missing-persons," Arty said. "Then my detectives wanted the case dropped, there was evidence suggesting the vic was the sort to just up-stakes and leave – minor substance abuse, self-harm, high-risk behavior, sort of thing."

"But," Merlin said, gravel crunching under Arty's boots as they approached his four-door Ford.

"But." Arty sighed and paused, hand on the door-latch. "Wholesome country sis shows up insisting the vic wouldn't do that without telling her. So I assign another pair to take another look as a courtesy, and they've got the vic last seen leaving a slum dive with this shady-looking guy…"

As Arty opened the door and leaned in to retrieve his slim black ESD from the passenger seat, Merlin clarified carefully, "Female vic?"

"Yeah. And this morning –" Merlin accepted the information-storage device without looking away from Arty's face, blue eyes alert but the flesh lined and sagging with exhaustion and years. "Found the body in a dumpster – accidentally, too, it was wrapped like trash but it snagged and the sanitation worker – well. Those are the first photos, just so you know."

Merlin grimaced. This, this was why he was tired. Even normal law enforcement got tired of this. Busting ass and sometimes it felt like it made no difference. Every day a new vic, a new perp. _Generations_ of them, Merlin had seen.

"But what makes you think –"

"Two things. One, she'd had her throat slit, body bled dry. I mean, dry. You and I know that doesn't happen unless the murderer takes certain deliberate steps to make sure it happens. Also there's a problem with the collected video footage of the night." Arty turned his head, raising one eyebrow to Merlin's querying look. "I won't say anything else, just… take a look and tell me what you think?"

"Yeah, all right." Merlin stood back, tucking the ESD under his arm, as Arty groaned his way into the driver's seat, slammed the door and started the car.

And rolled down the window. "Give you a ride, at least?"

"No, I – don't want to make you late getting home." Merlin smiled. "I'll be all right."

"You always are." Arty gave him a smile that was familiar – sympathetic teasing. And Merlin had found it amusing, until he couldn't see the original on Arthur's face anymore.

He turned and walked away, listening to Arty's car leave the lot, merge with the rest of traffic sound. Focusing on sensory input on the walk back to his place, he blocked any deeper thought.

The lobby attendant was new, since Bobby had married Kerry, but still one of them. Dark hair pulled into a tight bun, burgundy lipstick that smiled at Merlin, recognizing him. Neither of them spoke; he was acquainted with the handful living peacefully in his city, but he had become something of a loner among loners, and now Bobby was gone.

Once in his apartment, he dropped onto the sofa in front of his own electronic sharing device, sending a quick query to the others. Did anyone know anything about a rogue in the city recently.

Then he activated Arty's device to look through evidence.

Photos of the dump site. The ME's report. Nothing that worried him, though he agreed with Arty's evaluation of the degree of exsanguination. The girl was blonde and young and slender. Dressed for a night at a slum bar, and very little blood on the clothes, either. No other defensive wounds – which might mean she knew or at least trusted her attacker to cooperate up to a point - and no indication of intercourse, consenting or otherwise.

Lipstick smeared on her face like blood. Bloodlessly pale skin. Dead eyes gazing at nothing.

The silence oppressed his ears, and he found it hard to breathe. It didn't ever _not_ affect him. Especially the young girls.

Deliberately he turned to the information they had on her companion of that night. Her last night. Surveillance from cameras in and around the bar wasn't great – dark and distant, though the department techs had clearly done their best at enhancement. He could share them to his own device and run a few programs unsanctioned by law enforcement, but –

Merlin paused, moved his fingers on the screen. Flicked back to the first photo, caught as the two met, then tracked forward. First time, Merlin judged, by the girl's body language. He manipulated the stills and video, getting a jagged but chronological idea of their time together in the bar that night.

He'd nursed the same drink, as far as Merlin could tell, never more than touching his lips, though the girl had several, and different kinds. He'd held her hand almost constantly… no, not her hand precisely. Merlin zoomed in to make sure – he'd held her by the _wrist_. Pulse points. And both times he'd kissed her on what passed for a dance floor in that place, it had been on the neck, high under her ear.

Merlin remembered kissing Megan – the only girl he'd ever gotten close to after his senses were inhumanly heightened - but his observation of her lifeblood was only ever to gauge strength and rhythm and rejoice when signs were good, and hope when signs were bad. He couldn't even imagine doing that, contemplating _taking_ life from a person.

Shuddering through a sudden wave of nausea, he moved forward in the file.

They hadn't identified the man. Not by prints at the bar, or any DNA trace left on the body, not by facial recognition. Except, they had blood trace in the back alley, where they'd exited together; Merlin suspected – along with Arty and the other detectives, probably - that was the point of ambush.

The problem was, the lack of evidence after that. Because the moment the back door had swung shut behind the two, they'd virtually vanished. Which ought to have been impossible for the location. The still-frequency on one camera, and the pan-time for two others, meant one should have caught something. Getaway car, perp stumbling away under the weight of his victim. Even if he'd managed to bleed her right there, the dumpster where she'd been found was seven blocks away.

Unless he was inhumanly strong and fast, and at least smart enough to scout the location… then again, not smart – or patient, or charismatic – enough to lure the girl to a more secluded location.

Merlin flipped through the rest of the standard info, then sat back, thinking. No news coverage, not even online. The discovery of the body fairly random, even accidental. There was a decent chance this guy didn't know his crime had been discovered.

Mostly rogues like this were drifters. Calculating volume of blood, the need of how much and how often, to figure how long one victim could last a lone predator. But sooner or later a pattern showed, depending on how long a rogue had been living a hunting lifestyle, and lingering in the area. Attention from media and law enforcement – and from those few like him – would be logically avoided.

He hadn't taken what he wanted and left the body where it dropped. He'd taken care to extract as much as possible – probably would feed off the preserved substance for a while. Which meant, no immediate hunting. No sign of a partner – and the hunters of his kind didn't usually go in for that, _sharing_, it was easier to go it alone unless there was a pet type of human involved.

Merlin curled up on the couch and evened his breathing deliberately for slumber. There were four or five similar places he could canvass, though not til much later this evening, and probably by dawn he'd have responses from his and Bobby's acquaintances. And then to the station to meet Arty.

…..*….. …..*….. …..*…..

"Coffee?" Arty's lieutenant asked, appearing suddenly in the office doorway, steaming styrofoam cup in hand.

Merlin looked up from the horizontal desktop ESD. "Oh, no thank you." And refrained, with decades of experience doing so, from calling the man by name; he wasn't supposed to know him personally. "I have this thing with caffeine."

"Is it genetic?" the lieutenant asked affably. "I seem to remember your dad told me the same thing once, back when he partnered with the captain."

Merlin had discovered that Arty had at least paved the way for him to show up at the office, with this explanation; that and the lieutenant's recognition had given him immediate access to Arty's office, though the captain was expected any moment. He smiled a little wryly. "Yes, I suppose it must be."

"You definitely take after him in looks, anyway. I think there might be decaf if you're interested, but I can't guarantee how fresh."

"Thanks anyway."

"No problem – let me know if you need anything before he gets in." The lieutenant turned and sauntered away.

Some things truly never changed. Precinct décor – including sounds and smells of the best and worst of humanity – and the perpetual offer of coffee.

"Merlin, you're early," Arty said, wheezing a bit as he entered the room. Also with coffee in hand – though his was in a reusable travel mug from Starbucks. "Please tell me that means you've got something."

"Think so." Merlin gestured to the blue-liquid screen on the desktop, and Arty joined him, leaning over an interactive map of the city, focused on the section of the murder. "Here's the bar where our guy met the vic –" he pointed to one of the red markers he'd already placed. "Here's the dumpster. These four yellow dots are other slum bars like this one, the blue indicates abandoned or isolated properties where he could have taken her for the procedure, without fear of interruption or the need to establish himself on the grid doing something like renting. And _this_, is the strip joint where one of _my_ sources –" he glanced up to see that Arty had taken the meaning of his emphasis – "reported seeing the guy, last night."

Arty grimaced in acute distaste. "Well, that gives us something of a comfort zone at least, even if it's recent and temporary. What do you want to do?"

Merlin leaned on his hands, studying the map. "If we rush it, he'll slip. Depending on how old he is, how long he's been doing it, how keen senses and instincts are for local law… I want to poke around some of these blue areas. See if I can catch the scent of where he might have… killed her."

"You mean that literally, don't you. Scent." Merlin twitched a shrug, but Arty was focused on the map. "I can probably check some records, see which of these sites still have electricity, he'd need refrigeration at least, right?"

"Not necessarily. Cooler and a bag of ice would do for a couple of days. And then, more ice." Merlin stifled a yawn with the back of his hand, and Arty backed up to rest his weight against a side table under one of the office's windows to the rest of the floor.

"You were up late," he observed. "With this?"

"I went by these places," Merlin said, touching the yellow dots, each in turn, the pressure of his fingertip causing extra info to pop up on the screen as a sidebar to the map. "Just to… get a feel for them." Music, lighting, layout. Even clientele and employees. And now he knew _his_ way around.

Arty grunted. "I would like nothing better than to go with you. But, hell. I'm an old man, Merlin, I'd slow you down more than ever. But be careful. And I mean that personally as well as professionally."

"Don't get caught?" Merlin said, giving him a deliberately impudent grin. "When have I ever?"

"By _either_ side." Arty wasn't amused. "Keep me in the loop, huh? I'll do what I can for you from here."

"I know – and thanks."

**A/N: "What'll I Do" written by Irving Berlin, 1923.**

**I feel like I want to apologize for this one. It wouldn't do what I wanted it to do - last week I scrapped about four pages and a day and a half of work, to start over at an earlier point, and this morning I second-guessed myself and started to add an extra scene. But it felt unnecessarily complicated/cluttered, so I pared it back again. If this feels abrupt and bare-bones, it's because it probably is. But, happy or not, the point was the very last scene (next chapter), which did work out quite nicely imo, so I decided to quit while I had something decent to post, and close this arc. Fortunately or unfortunately, it was long as well as late, so the second half will be up probably Thursday…**


	8. Take Me Home 2

**Take Me Home** (cont.)

It was quiet on these streets in daylight. Merlin shoved his hands in his pockets and sauntered, observing surreptitiously as he moved from one blue-dot location to the next. Strip mall units for rent. A discount store that was fire-damaged. Out-of-business tire shop.

Not much of a life, really, the guy _he_ was hunting. Because what were the things that made life worthwhile? Employment that contributed to society. Earned income spent on creature comforts. Companionship and love, people to do for and laugh with. But this? Squatting and stealing and killing and running?

More animal than man, Merlin thought. Hunting to survive – and once that need was reliably filled, he'd gone to satisfy other base animal drives. Also on the cheap.

He kicked at rubbish in the street and squinted up at broken windows, tried door-handles and prowled through dank stale spaces. And found only where the rogue _hadn't_ brought the girl.

At sundown, that part of the city woke, shook itself, scratched itself – and went nosing to relieve itself.

Merlin called Arty. "Nothing so far, but I've ruled out more than half those blue dots. I think I'm going to stick around here, though, a few more hours, maybe work my way through that handful of bars, again."

"You said he wouldn't need –"

"No, he wouldn't be hunting again, so soon." And both of them knew the rogue wouldn't be there for the beer and pretzels, either. "But he might be trying to pick up a few bucks hustling pool or something. Pick up a girl who won't ask him for a hundred up front."

Arty sighed through the wireless connection. "All right. Where are you going first?"

Merlin named him one of the other slum bars, the closest to the core formed by the two previous sightings and the dumpster, and hung up. Then drifted in that direction, in no real hurry. The odds were against him actually coming face to face with the guy by chance, but if he did, the appearance of haste might be enough to tip him off if he was wary.

There were differences that Merlin could tell, depending on proximity. Not really giveaways, to anyone but another like them. Heart-rate and breathing, temperature and perspiration level and so on, which for normal humans would be affected, by these places. Not obvious, though, it took some concentration to pick out these differences, so he could assume he might go unnoticed by the other.

Merlin loitered outside the slum bar three-quarters of an hour, ruling out about the same percentage of patrons entering, before he ventured inside himself.

Noisy, and smoky, and steadily filling up. This one had a DJ and a dance floor, flashing neon lights and a partial upper level that overlooked it. Merlin leaned on the bar absently, concentrating first on the subtle body hints of those nearest him. He was looking for a male, of course, and he had a general idea of facial features and body type, but it wouldn't do to _look_ like he was looking. That would make him suspicious to a majority of the people in here, for one reason or another.

"What'll it be?" the harried bartender yelled at him, sweat glistening on his receding hairline under the unforgiving lighting.

Merlin mumbled something noncommittal, not really paying attention, as someone slid onto the stool behind and beside him – he figured that the new customer would take attention off him.

"I'll buy ya Bloody Mary," the newcomer offered, bending to say it deliberately into Merlin's ear.

"No, thanks," he said. Half a second slow – then he turned to see Arty seated on the next stool, leaning over his crossed arms on the bar.

"Bloody somebody else?" Arty suggested, grinning, and Merlin laughed out loud.

"I haven't heard that one in forever," he said, right next to Arty's ear – the only way the other man would hear him, in this noise. That had been Arthur's first joke, teasing Merlin about his condition. Assuring him as no serious conversation could have, that it wasn't an issue for Arthur.

"Eh?" the bartender said, curling an impatient hand around his ear.

Arty ordered them a couple of beers for the opacity of the dark-brown bottle, then turned to Merlin. "Well?"

"He's not down here," Merlin told him. "I was going to check upstairs, maybe find a table with a good view of the dance floor and the door, for another hour, before I move on. Tomorrow I can do the rest of the canvassing – with a little luck I'll find his hideout, and we can go in if he's there, or sit on it til he gets back."

"And when you say we, you mean you," Arty said sardonically, and Merlin nodded. "Guess I can't persuade you to change your mind… well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I can stay a few hours, I told Tracy I'd be late tonight anyway."

"Hey," Merlin said, a bit troubled at the thought – but knowing he'd have no better luck changing Arty's mind, than if it was his father there. "Are you carrying?" Arty's expression shifted, and Merlin assumed the answer. "My revolver's at the back of my belt. Take it, please? You know he can't do anything to _me_."

He turned in a nonchalant lounge on the bar countertop, felt his former partner ease the weapon free of his belt, and glanced back to see Arty tucking it into his own waistband. There; that was all right, then.

"Yo!" the bartender called, handing them their order by the necks of the bottles.

Arty put the cash down for their drinks – which neither one of them would be actually drinking – and handed one to Merlin.

"Next round's on me," Merlin kidded, threading between bodies to the stairs.

This was also why he was tired. So much had changed, in his lifetime. And yet, not much at all. Sometimes it was hard to convince himself he'd done any good whatsoever. Behind him on the stairs, Arty called something that Merlin didn't catch; he pressed closer to the wall to let an old-young couple bump giggling down past them.

"What?" he hollered, but kept going.

"I said, I think the music gets louder, every decade!" Arty hollered back, as they came off the top of the stairs to the open second story.

"That's where you're wrong," Merlin called back, signaling that he would take the left, if Arty would cover the right-hand perimeter of the room. "This isn't music!" Arty nodded and laughed, and headed right.

It was darker and more cramped, up here, but mostly seated-space. Merlin moved to the left to circumnavigate the floor, scanning patrons for a single male, or one trying to flirt with strangers. Halfway around, where the rail met the wall and one could lean over to see down to the dance floor, Merlin caught a sense of something different.

Blood free from alcohol. A pulse slightly quickened, but confident and fearless as humans rarely were.

Merlin leaned casually on the rail, slim but sturdy metal, and turned his head slightly, tipping the bottle to his closed lips. Yep, there he was. Appearing mid-thirties, narrow face and dark hair combed straight back from a widow's peak. Crooked nose, and eyes almost fanatically intent on the girl across the table. Merlin saw short dark hair, bare shoulders under sleeveless shirt.

Best to back off. Leave the building, watch the exits, and follow him when he left. But as Merlin began to let his gaze sweep past the couple, several things happened nearly simultaneously.

The man stiffened like a predator scenting prey – or vice versa, it was a similar reaction of alert wariness – and his darting eyes caught Merlin. Recognized Merlin – not specifically, but as another like him. From his expression, the rogue immediately anticipated conflict rather than conversation.

And a heavyset older man stepped past the couple's table, glancing down into the rogue's face – doing a quick double-take – following his gaze to Merlin, already focusing and tightening for whatever action became unavoidable.

Merlin's gaze shifted to meet Arty's – and his friend's hand went for the revolver.

Damn. _No_, not _here_!

The rogue turned to look up at the aging police captain with a secondary realization dawning – maybe even connecting their presence to his victim. He shot up from his seat, reaching to grab Arty.

Merlin read his body and leaped forward. Arty's face registered surprise as his feet left the ground, his bottle dropping from his hand at the same time as Merlin's did – Merlin's boot found the top of the next table along the railing and pushed off.

Arty went sailing headfirst over the rail – and Merlin dove after him.

Catching one of Arty's flailing hands in his – anchoring himself to the rail with the other. Muscles tightening against the inevitable –

Merlin grunted involuntarily as Arty's weight jerked his body taut.

Women were screaming on both levels. The music pounded on. Dangling, Arty looked up from the rapidly-clearing dance floor still a good fifteen feet below him; there was shock on his face, and he shook his head at Merlin, mouthing, _No_.

Because probably he could read Merlin's determination on his face – or simply knew him well enough by now. But then, he should have known Merlin would ignore Arty trying to talk him out of exposing himself with an impossible rescue – and going immediately after the quarry, especially this one.

_Sorry, Arty._

Merlin flexed, and pulled his friend back up to the railing, one-handed, smooth and fast though the older man outweighed him by half again as much. He waited for Arty to catch hold with his free hand, transferred the one he still held to the bar, and steadied Arty's climb back to the safe side, until two or three of the better-meaning, less-drunk patrons at the top level caught hold to aid him.

_Can't wait now._ If the rogue slipped, it would be far away, and he'd become someone else's problem, sooner rather than later. Other precincts, other bodies – and by damn, Merlin was tired of _chasing_.

"Call for backup if you like," he hollered to Arty, glancing below to make sure the floor was clear.

Then let go, twisting catlike to land in a crouch on all four.

More voices raised in excitement-shock-fear. Arty bellowed something about the revolver. Merlin sprang up, looking past the faces of the crowd to the far wall, where the bottom of the stair came out very near to the exterior door.

They'd be equidistant from the exit. The rogue had a head start, the second it had taken to save Arty from the fall. But Merlin had bypassed the stairs.

Fast and fluid as water, he darted between patrons – they should probably not have their fight here, but he'd have to be close to stay with the guy if he escaped and if not that, then he could try to manage a capture at least marginally official. He was still ten feet away when the rogue reached the bottom of the steps, shoving people out of the way – head turning to mark Merlin, keen eyes wide with incredulity.

Merlin adjusted his angle, ducked under a biker's raised elbow, and arrived between the rogue and the door.

In the blink of an eye, the other straightened, arm outstretched. Gleam of metal in his hand – small blunt point pressed to the center of Merlin's chest.

The insane rush of time _slowed_.

He didn't look away – centuries, he glimpsed, just like Bobby, but so terribly dark. Feral.

And he couldn't help a peripheral recognition of his own revolver, the thumb cocking the hammer back, reading to fire. Probably snatched from Arty's hand as the rogue tossed him over the rail. Probably that was what Arty had been trying to tell him.

Silver bullets. Did the rogue guess?

They had a very small, quiet, slow bubble of calm, balanced on either side of the revolver like children on a see-saw. Outside the bubble, patrons scrambled away – furniture tipped, glass broke – distantly over the other shouting, Merlin could hear Arty's bull-bellow from upstairs.

In a tone that clearly questioned Merlin's choices and loyalties, the rogue said, "You're one of _us_."

Merlin said, "Did you kill the blonde girl, with the pink shirt, her name was Kristen."

Probably people could hear them; he didn't care. Dark eyes widened fractionally, heart-rate increased half-a-count, breathing hitched nearly imperceptibly. As good as a signed confession.

"Move aside," the rogue told him. Warned him, commanded him, challenged him. "And don't follow me."

"No."

"Nonnegotiable," the rogue said. "Ten seconds to choose. I ain't stayin' peaceful."

And he'd do it, he'd pull the trigger, Merlin saw the truth of that in his face. Whether he knew it would kill Merlin, whether he thought it would only stop him pursuing, he'd do it.

"_Merlin_!"

Arty, halfway down the stairs, his shout cutting sharply through the noise level that lowered significantly as the music cut off.

The rogue began to turn, the revolver to pan – _crowded_ room, and the type of bullet wouldn't matter to _them_. Merlin ducked to his right, knocking the rogue's arm up, circling his forearm around his throat for a stranglehold – which was in turn caught by the man's other hand. And his muscles were tight and hard as Merlin's.

But now they both faced the stair where Arty continued to descend, warily deliberate, step by step, badge in his hand to prove his authority to command surrender.

"Ha!" the rogue coughed, addressing Merlin behind him. "You work with them. Well. If you're going to screw with my gig, I'm going to screw with yours."

And he fought.

Each move too fast for thought. Merlin the better-trained, but hampered by his need to contain the violence, protect the innocent. Blows mostly ducked, and holds broken almost as soon as gained - it lasted less than a minute, but Merlin still had some idea of enforcing Arty's commands rather than killing a suspect in front of so many witnesses, when.

The revolver went off.

He heard it. One second before gasp-scream-_Merlin_! echoed through his head.

It felt like someone stabbed him with an icicle. Upper left arm, to the inside.

Merlin had been in firefight situations before, in his very long law enforcement career. He'd been shot before, too.

The rogue probably hadn't, either one. He flinched, and hesitated.

And Merlin didn't. As his left arm went weak and numb, he twisted to bring his right hand to the revolver's grip and firing mechanisms, on the outside of the rogue's hand. Using his elbow to bend the rogue's arm around, their combined momentum wrapped his body in the man's one-armed embrace. His back to the other's chest, he tripped him with the toe of his boot behind his ankle, and flung them both backward to the floor.

He found hammer and trigger almost simultaneously as they landed – the rogue underneath, hitting harder and with Merlin's weight on him – felt the barrel between his left arm and ribs.

The gun discharged again.

This time, there was no pain. Merlin felt the rogue gasp, shudder. Stiffen, then writhe, as Merlin forced the firearm pointing harmlessly at the wall. Held, and _held_, and felt the rogue's struggles weaken as life left his body.

And then, he was the only one gasping for air.

Arty stepped off the lowest stair just above them, reaching for the revolver still in their shared grip. Merlin allowed it, sliding off and away from the body.

He was shaking. It had been a long time since he'd killed anyone this close.

"Guy's a freakin' hero," someone said, out of the murmur of the crowd. "That crazy dude was going to shoot up this place."

"Is he a cop? Hey, mister, is he a cop?"

Arty said immediately, in a hard, almost defiant tone, "Yes. Yes, he is." To Merlin he added, "There's blood all over."

"Keep 'em back," Merlin gasped. He rested himself back on his right elbow, clutching his left arm to his body for warmth, letting his legs sprawl to _rest_. Damn, he was tired. "Give it a few minutes, it won't be – viable. Not… dangerous, anymore."

Arty swore inexplicably, shoving Merlin's revolver into his belt for the second time that night – then scrambling over the corpse to Merlin as well as a sixty-year-old police captain could. "Merlin, you're bleeding."

"Hey, we've called 911," someone offered. Arty ignored the speaker, straightening to dig for and snap out a pocketknife.

Merlin wondered why he was trying to hold himself up, and let his body collapse back onto the floor. Probably filthy. He'd have to wash his hair…

Arty cut open his sleeve with a single slash that was both vicious and gentle.

"Man, we called paramedics," someone said.

And someone else, "Aren't you supposed to just hold it tight to stop the bleeding? Put pressure on it, that's what they say, right?"

The first, "Man, he knows what he's doing, just shut up."

"It was your gun," Arty told Merlin in a dreadful voice, handling his left arm that was so cold now it felt like it belonged to someone else. "And there's no exit wound… Geez, this is a lot of blood, I think it hit your artery… it might be stuck on your bone."

"I kind of thought silver would hurt," Merlin whispered. "It's just… cold."

Arty grimaced in distaste at the wound Merlin couldn't see – and didn't really care to. "I have to get it out," he decided. "How long have you got?"

"Just leave it," Merlin told him. "Doesn't… really hurt. Just… cold."

"Merlin." Arty's eyes were scared. "You'll _die_."

He thought hazily, _Oh, good_. _Finally_.

"What are you talking about, man, it's just his arm."

"Yeah, but look at all that blood."

"Stay back, and shut up!" Arty snarled at the strangers. Merlin blinked at the unfamiliar tone in his friend's voice, and Arty's face came into focus. His expression.

Merlin sighed. "Go ahead and cut it out, then."

Arty's attention focused to Merlin's left, and the most he could tell was that his arm was being touched. Cold seeped through his shoulder, trickled over his ribs like a woodland stream over exposed tree-roots. His neck felt stiff, but when someone stepped forward from the crowd, Merlin instinctively turned his head to look.

Mid-twenties, fit and lightly-muscled, clean and straight and unusual in this crowd. Crooked smile, a lock of his straight blonde hair falling over his forehead.

He said, "I told you it was psychotic to carry that revolver with you."

Merlin said with surprise, "Arthur."

"I almost got it, Merlin," Arty said at his other side, though Merlin didn't look away from the amused-concerned expression of his first partner and best friend. "Hold on, okay? You're going to be okay."

The crowd faded out, slowly and one by one. The noise faded, too; Merlin was relieved. His body jerked in reaction to Arty's work, but he paid it no mind.

"What are you doing in a place like this," Merlin said. The cold spread down his hip, across his chest; his mouth felt slow. "Arthur?"

"Merlin, look at me," Arty said. He sounded desperate, but Merlin watched Arthur step forward and kneel down, instead. "Look at me, huh? Look at – my father's not here, okay? He passed away, remember?"

Merlin remembered, and gave Arthur a wondering look.

"He can't see me," Arthur explained, turning the proud look that Merlin had seen hundreds of times, on his son. "Or hear me."

"Why not?" Merlin said.

Arthur's smile quirked a little melancholy. "I'm not here for him."

"Gwen –" Merlin began.

Arty interrupted. "I've got it, Merlin – the bullet's out. I'll just get the bleeding slowed and – Merlin? Oh, damn. Come on, Merlin!"

"It's not her time. Not yet," Arthur said.

Merlin couldn't nod, but he thought Arthur could see that he accepted the idea. It was his time. At _long_ last. "Can I tell him –"

"Sure." Arthur nodded, and put his hand down on Merlin's shoulder, where instant warmth blossomed. It was so very welcome after the cold that Merlin almost sobbed for relief. "Tell him I'm proud of him. That he doesn't need you anymore."

Merlin's head was turned, he felt Arty's hand trembling on his cheek, but he spoke first. "Your dad wants you to know… he's proud of you. You don't need…"

There were tears in Arty's blue eyes. He searched Merlin's – and resistance melted gradually to acceptance.

"I want to go home," Merlin whispered, as Arthur's hand slid down his arm to take his hand. He gripped it, and his vision faded to white around the edges.

Around Arty, who held his gaze a moment longer. Then nodded, tears shining unspilled. He smiled, and nodded again. "Say hi for me."

Arthur pulled on Merlin's hand, and he automatically pulled back, lifting his head and raising his knees, the better to gain his feet. And grinned in pure joy at facing his friend again. Arthur was so clear in the foggy whiteness, his hand so warm on Merlin's.

"Come on," Arthur said.

"But what about –"

The increased insistence of Arthur's grip stopped him from turning to look at Arty, behind him. "Don't look back," Arthur told him gently. "Don't look back. Just – walk forward with me."

Merlin obeyed; though he couldn't see where they were going, Arthur appeared to know the way. And fatigue bled from his limbs along with the chill, at every step.

"Where are we –"

"Always with the questions, Merlin," Arthur teased. "Trust me."

"I do."

Arthur gave him his familiar lopsided smile. "Then, I have someone here that's been waiting a very long time to see you."

A strain of music floated past his ears. "_Good luck says I'll be with you soon_…" And a shadow in the brightness coalesced into a slender figure. In peach-rose silk. Shaking back dark shoulder-length waves to give him a full smile.

"Lori," he breathed.

And she was in his arms, clinging and breathing and laughing and crying, and Arthur's hand resting on his shoulder was the opposite of intrusive.

"Take your time," Arthur said in his ear, and Merlin heard the grin, and the ache of missing and missing what he'd lost was finally gone. "But remember, while we're waiting for others, others are waiting for us. And, there's a feast later – you must be _starving_ for some real food."

Merlin pulled back to look at him, astonished. At his side, Lori giggled; Arthur threw back his head and laughed.

And it was home, after all.

…..*….. …..*….. …..*…..

_Closing time…  
Time for you to go out to the places you will be from_

_Closing time…  
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end._

_I know who I want to take me home  
I know who I want to take me home  
I know who I want to take me home  
Take me home…_

"Closing Time" ~ Semisonic

…..*….. …..*….. …..*…..

**A/N: Thanks so much for everyone who supported with reviews and follows and favorites – this is **_**it**_** for this 'verse, though! Complete means complete, this time. I'm glad if you enjoyed!**


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